I was called to a meeting at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa. Due to a patient with a head injury, I was unable to meet on time. Night flight was prohibited in country. It required a life-death situation. Mr. Hibbard, the pilot-in-charge (PIC) of the other medevac aircraft arrived late in the evening with the patient. The hospital at JTF-Bravo was unable to provide neuro-care. They arranged for a neuro-surgeon to fly into Tegucigalpa (TNT) that night. I replaced Mr. Hibbard's co-pilot and flew the night mission to the capital city. As we approached Tegucigalpa the lights to the city were turned off. This was an indicator to us that word of our night flight was not passed on to the Honduran military as expected. When we saw the blackout of Tegucigalpa, we dropped to night low-level flight and turned off all of our position lights. We continued toward the city at about 60 knots. Our low-level recon revealed that we were just south east of the airport. Having flown into the airport on many occasions, I was aware of the anti-aircraft artillery locations around the airport. One clear area was the main terminal. We repositioned over the city to the north of the air terminal, entered over the main terminal, then dropped to ground level, and flew about one foot above the runway to the U.S. military area. We shut down the aircraft as Honduran military jeeps arrived with 50 calibre machine guns pointing at us. The ambulance and a car from the U.S. Embassy were held back until General Alverez arrived to take the prisoners (us). When he arrived, he asked another officer how a helicopter could breech the perimeter of the airport and main military base. We were still sitting in the helicopter with our flight helmets on. When we were ordered out, I took off my helmet and saluted the general. I pointed to the child who had been hit by a U.S. military truck earlier in the day. An ambulance arrived and we transferred the patient.

The general released us and accompanied us to the embassy. When I arrived at the embassy, I was introduced to William Barr, Mike Harari, and Buddy Young. I had met Mr. Young one year prior in Little Rock, Arkansas. Mr. Barr represented himself as an emissary of Vice President Bush, who would be arriving in the future. This was an advance party designed to set up meetings for Vice President Bush. We joined the cocktail party and then accommodations were arranged at a local hotel. I was then asked to join Mr. Barr, Mr. Young, and Mr. Harari at a local German restaurant. I was picked up by the embassy car. Major Felix Rodriguez was in the car when I entered. We met the others for dinner and continued the meeting at the hotel. I was told that Mr. Young and Mr. Harari would fly back to Palmerola with me in the morning.

We departed the following morning with the passengers listed in Item 19 Remarks section of the Department of Defense Flight Plan dated 16 March, 1985.

The following conversation took place between Messrs. Harari and Young during the flight to Palmerola Air Base. The passengers were wearing headsets and speaking over the aircraft intercom system due to the high noise level in the helicopter. As the command pilot, I routinely monitor all conversations on our intercom. I did not advise our passengers that I was listening, or that I was recording the conversation.

Buddy: "Arkansas has the capability to manufacture anything in the area of weapons - and if we don't have it - we'll get it!"

Mike: "How about government controls?"

Buddy: "The Governor's on top of it, and if the feds get nosey - we hear about it and make a call. Then they're called off." He was looking around the countryside and continued, "Why the hell would anyone want to fight for a shit-hole like this?"

Mike: Shaking his head in awe, answered,"What we do has nothing to do with preserving a country's integrity - it's just business, and third world countries see their destiny as defeating borders and expanding. The more of this mentality we can produce - the greater our wealth. We train and we arm - that's our job. And, in return, we get a product far more valuable than the money for a gun. We're paid with product. And we credit top dollar for product."

Buddy: Still looked confused.

Mike: "Look - one gun and 3,000 rounds of ammo is $1,200. A kilo of product is about $1,000. We credit the Contras $1,500 for every kilo. That's top dollar for a kilo of cocaine. It's equivalent to the American K-Mart special - buy four, get one free. On our side - we spend $1,200 for a kilo and sell it for $12,000 to $15,000. Now, that's a profit center. And the market is much greater for the product than for weapons. It's just good business sense - understand?

Buddy: "Damn! So you guys promote wars and revolutions to provide weapons for drugs - we provide the non-numbered parts to change out and we all win. Damn that's good!"

Mike: "It's good when it works - but someone is, how do you say, has his hand in the coffer."

Buddy: Responding on the defensive,"Well, we get our ten percent right off the top and that's plenty. GOFUS can make it go a long way." Mike:"Who is GOFUS?"

Buddy: "Governor Clinton! That's our pet word for him. You know they call the President 'POTUS' for 'President of the United States'. Well, we call Clinton 'GOFUS' for 'Governor of the United States'. He thinks he is anyhow.

Mike: "That's your problem in America. You have no respect for your elected officials. They are more powerful than you think and have ears everywhere. You should heed my words and be loyal to your leaders. Especially when speaking to persons like me. Your remarks indicate a weakness - something our intelligence analysts look for."

Buddy: "Aw hell, Mike. Everybody knows the Clinton's want the White House and will do anything to get it. That's why I'm here instead of someone else. We know about the cocaine - hell! I've picked it up before with Lasater when he was worried about going on Little Rock Air Base to get it."

A new line of conversation ensued. Harari questioned Young about his knowledge of who the 'players' were. He went down a list. He started with 'The Boss - Clinton'. Here's a synopsis of the players according to Young.

Buddy: "Clinton - thinks he's in charge, but he'll only go as far as Casey allows. Me and my staff - we keep the lid on things you know - complaints about night flying - Arkansas people are private folks - they don't like a lot of commotion and Mena just isn't the right place for the operation. It keeps us busy at the shredder - if you know what I mean. Dan the Man (Lasater) - He does magic with the money - between him and Jack Stevens we don't have to worry a bit. Then we got Parks - if there's a problem - he's the man. We call him the Archer - that's the codename that Casey and Colby told us to assign to that position. Finnis oversee's our drop zone. Nash - he's just the boss' 'yes' man. Personally I think he's a mistake! Seal and his guys - I like his attitude "and leave the driving to us!" he said, quoting one of Seal's good ole boy sayings.

Mike: "You like Seal?"

Buddy: "Hell! He's the only one I trust - respect is the word."

Mike: "Do you see much of him?"

Buddy: "Hell, yea. We test drive Clinton's rides before we send 'em on, ya know? (He laughed, grinding his hips.) Say - how much coke do you recon you can make in a week?"

Mike: "One camp can produce 400 keys a week. The others are about half that. But that's just our operation here. We have other sources in various parts of the world. Why do you ask?"

Buddy: "What? Oh, the Governor wanted to know our capacity."

Mike: "Who else is on the team?"

Buddy: "Well, hell, I forgot who I told you about."

Mike ran down the list from memory.

Buddy: "Ok, there's the manufacturers - hell, these two.."

The tape stopped.

I didn't recognize the names. I ran out of paper on my kneeboard shortly after the tape stopped. Something like Johnson and Johnson. The flight continued and so did their discussions...about people mostly. We landed and I went to Operations and made a note on the back of the flight plan that I filed by phone.

Michael "Mike" Harari (born 1927) was an Israeli intelligence officer in the Mossad. Harari was involved in several notable operations, including the failed Lillehammer affair and the rescue of hostages at Entebbe.

Harari began his intelligence work facilitating illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine after World War II. He then spent time in the army and Shin Bet before being recruited by the Mossad in the 1960s. During his time in the Mossad he ran agents in Europe, eventually advancing to the head of the Operations Branch. It was during this time that he helped build and lead teams in Operation Wrath of God, the Israeli response to the Munich Massacre in 1972. In what became known as the Lillehammer affair, Harari led a team into Norway where they believed Ali Hassan Salameh, the chief of Black September operations was living. After identifying and assassinating the target, it was revealed that they had killed an innocent waiter, Ahmed Bouchiki, who only resembled Salameh. While authorities arrested many of Harari's team, he escaped back to Israel. A Norwegian case against him was dismissed in January 1999 because of a lack of evidence.[1]

Despite this setback, Harari later scored two major successes for the Mossad. Before Operation Thunderbolt was launched in July, 1976, to free Israeli hostages at Entebbe International Airport, Harari supposedly took the disguise of an Italian businessman to enter and reconnoiter the airport. He also helped facilitate the use of Kenyan air bases to refuel Israeli planes returning from the rescue mission.[2] In January, 1979, Harari led a team that killed Ali Hassan Salameh in Beirut with a car bomb, the same man he had tried to assassinate in Lillehammer years earlier.

At some later point in time Harari became the Mossad station chief of Latin America but based in Israel. Although he is said to have retired after this service, it is unclear if all his Israeli intelligence connections were severed when he left for Panama, He returned to Israel just before or during the 1989 United States invasion of Panama, which deposed Noriega and installed the legitimate presidential victor Guillermo Endara. Harari later appeared on Israeli television and denied that he was ever a close advisor of Noriega, and that he had escaped by his own means. [3]

Harari was played by actor Moshe Ivgy in Steven Spielberg's 2005 film Munich,[4] which depicts a controversial account of Operation Wrath of God.

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

Did Steven Spielberg turn the man who organized the Bali hotel bombing - and the mass slaughter of 9/11 - into a Hollywood hero?

Spielberg's 2005 film Munich follows the exploits of Mossad agent Mike Harari (played by Moshe Ivgy) as he attempts to track down and kill the Black September guerrillas who organized the kidnapping of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

According to former Soviet nuclear weapons specialist Dmitri Khalezov, the real-life Mike Harari befriended him while the two were living in Thailand in 2001, effectively admitted to organizing 9/11, then later tried to set Khalezov up to take the rap for 9/11-related crimes. (For details, check out my latest, two-hour interview with Khalezov and Gordon Duff which will soon be archived here; or my earlier interviews with Duff and Khalezov; or Khalezov's book.)

According to Khalezov, Mike Harari was arrested by Thai police for organizing the Bali hotel bombing, which Khalezov, like Australian journalist Joe Viallis (who was allegedly murdered for his trouble) says was done with a Mossad micro-nuke. Khalezov says Harari was arrested under the name Hadji Mohamed Husseini. Below are Khalezov's pictures of Mike Harari and his Thai "concubine," copies of the false passports Harari used (which Khalezov obtained from Thai police records of Harari's/"Husseini's" arrest), and a disputed TV image of a much younger Harari.

I don't think that there are could be a lot of photos with Mike Harari, especially "well known" ones. This guy is not so stupid, actually. What is known to me (also from him personally, but also from otherserious people) that in 1990 (well before the Internet became widely used) the Israeli Government in the most official manner kindly requested all mass media outlets all over the world to surrender all pictures of Mike Harari to the Israeli state (citing some plausible reasons and supporting the request with some cash, of course), and not to keep any copies of them. And after that successful operation Harari was more than careful not to allow anyone to have his pictures. I am actually quite a rare person who managed to obtain a couple of his real photos. In 2005 (after I was released from prison) I attempted to find some pictures of Mike Harari in his younger age desperately searching the Internet. I was not able to find any. And I repeated these searches at least twice a year. At one moment I noticed that one of the old picture with Noriega has appeared, but I am not quite sure if it is really genuine and not a part of the Mossad pre-emptive disinformation game. But when it comes to the picture of him on the TV-screen this one was not available I guess till very recent. And the fact of its appearance could be counted as a disinfo operation as well. To be honest with you I have never seen Harari before 2001 and I have no clue how he looked like before, since I have never seen his previous pictures either, but only saw his character portrayed by various actors in various movies (most importantly - by a Soviet-Georgian actor Vakhtang Kikabidze in the famous KGB-sponsored serial "TASS was authorized to declare"). That is why I simply have no chance to compare his former pictures with the new ones due to the total absence of the former (thanks to the careful policy of the Mossad described above). That is why to claim that there are "well known pictures of Mike Harari" is a bit bold claim, in my humble opinion. If such "well known pictures" of him do exist, they are certainly not in the wilderness of the Internet, but exclusively inside secret files of a few lucky secret-services.

All I could say that the guy I have a picture of is indeed Mike Harari, simply because it can't be anyone else. Mike Harari is such a unique person, with such a unique biography, such a unique character, andvariety of other unique personal features, that you can't simply find any other man that could pass for him and to perfectly match all Harari's actual features (including his ability to assassinate American colonels in the Philippines and his ability to invite an Israeli Ambassadors to his apartment for a drink, for example). How many Israeli people do you actually know who are about ~1927 year of birth, know perfect French, English, reasonable Spanish, recently arrived from the Philippines to Bangkok (because of the murder committed there against an American colonel), leaves in the compound guarded by the Israeli security, has penchant for diplomatic passports, claims to be the best friend of Khun Sa, Cao Ky, Noriega and Bush Senior, and also invites the local Israeli Ambassador to visit him in his apartment? If it is not Mike Harari, then who it is? That is why you don't have to doubt - the man I knew in Bangkok in 2001-2003 is Mike Harari and no one else. It is not 100%, it is 101%. And the photo I have is of that man. But you have to be prepared - the Mossad (and the French alike, and I guess the CIA as well) will deny it of course. And will plant various "innocently looking" [dis]info that will cast doubt on what I claim. So, don't be surprised if you see something like this.

Posted by Kevin Barrett at 7:53 PM

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

Look, one of the big issues with 9/11 was who would be on the ground, actual ops guys. Mike Harari is the f**king Jackal. He could have done half the operation at WTC on his own.

Jackson Stevens is connected to PROMIS software and PTECH!

THIS IS LIKE A HUGE FRICKING PIECE OF THE LOGISTICAL OPERATIONS!

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

A strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) is a lawsuit that is intended to censor, intimidate and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition.[1]

The typical SLAPP plaintiff does not normally expect to win the lawsuit. The plaintiff's goals are accomplished if the defendant succumbs to fear, intimidation, mounting legal costs or simple exhaustion and abandons the criticism. A SLAPP may also intimidate others from participating in the debate. A SLAPP is often preceded by a legal threat. The difficulty, of course, is that plaintiffs do not present themselves to the Court admitting that their intent is to censor, intimidate or silence their critics. Hence, the difficulty in drafting SLAPP legislation, and in applying it, is to craft an approach which affords an early termination to invalid abusive suits, without denying a legitimate day in court to valid good faith claims.

History

The acronym was coined in the 1980s by University of Denver professors Penelope Canan and George W. Pring. The term was originally defined as "a lawsuit involving communications made to influence a governmental action or outcome, which resulted in a civil complaint or counterclaim filed against nongovernment individuals or organizations on a substantive issue of some public interest or social significance."[2] It has since been defined more broadly in one state (California) to include suits about speech on any public issue.[3]

The original conceptualization proffered by Canan and Pring emphasized the Right to petition as protected in the United States under the US Constitution's specific protection in the First Amendment's fifth clause. It is still definitional: SLAPPs refer to civil lawsuits filed against those who have communicated to government officialdom (in its entire constitutional apparatus). The Right to Petition [granted by Edgar the Peaceful, 10 Century] precedes the Magna Carta in terms significance in the development of democratic institutions. It claims that democracy cannot work if there are, or if interest groups can erect, barriers between the governed and the governing.

According to New York Supreme Court Judge J. Nicholas Colabella, "Short of a gun to the head, a greater threat to First Amendment expression can scarcely be imagined." A number of jurisdictions have made such suits illegal, provided that the appropriate standards of journalistic responsibility have been met by the critic.

Jurisdictional variations

Canada

One of the first cases in Canada to deal with a SLAPP was Fraser v. Saanich (see [1999] B.C.J. No. 3100 (B.C. S.C.)) (QL), where the British Columbia Supreme Court struck out the claim of a hospital director against the District of Saanich, holding that it was a meritless action designed to silence or intimidate the residents who were opposed to the plaintiff’s plan to redevelop the hospital facilities.

The first case to discuss and apply the Protection of Public Participation Act (PPPA) was Home Equity Development v. Crow, (see [2002] B.C.J. No. 1805 (B.C. S.C.)) (QL). The defendants' application to dismiss the action against them was dismissed. The defendants failed to meet the burden of proof required by the PPPA, that the plaintiffs had no reasonable prospect of success. Many felt that the plaintiffs did not bring their action for an improper purpose, and the suit did not inhibit the defendants in their public criticism of the particular project.

In Ontario, the decision in Daishowa v. Friends of the Lubicon (see [1996] O.J. No. 3855 Ont. Ct. Gen. Div.)) (QL) was also instructive on SLAPPs. A motion brought by the corporate plaintiff Daishowa to impose conditions on the defendant Friends of the Lubicon Indian Band that they would not represent Daishowa’s action as a SLAPP was dismissed.

Some political libel and forum shopping incidents, both common in Canada, have been called SLAPP suits, because such suits load defendants with costs of responding in unfamiliar jurisdictions or at times (typically elections) when they're extremely busy and short of funds. Both types of suits are almost unique to Canada, so there is little concern nor examination of whether political subject matter or remote forums are a clear indicator of SLAPP.

Following the decision in Fraser v. Saanich, the Protection of Public Participation Act went into effect in British Columbia in April, 2001. It was repealed in August, 2001.

Québec's Justice Minister, Jacques Dupuis, has proposed an anti-SLAPP bill on June 13, 2008.[4]. The bill was adopted by the National Assembly of Quebec on June 3, 2009. As of now, Quebec's amended Code of Civil Procedure is the only anti-SLAPP mechanism in force in Canada.

United States

California has a unique variant of anti SLAPP legislation which has led a significant volume of SLAPP litigation in that state. A search for reported cases on SLAPP litigation in 2009 found 1,386 cases for the State of California alone. The rest of the states combined had about 341, of which Massachusetts accounted for 176, raising the question whether California's SLAPP statute is accomplishing its primary objective of reducing costly litigation. See | Navellier v. Sletten, 52 P.3d 703 (Cal. 2002) (dissenting opinion). The U.S. state of California enacted Code of Civil Procedure § 425.16 in 1992, a statute intended to frustrate SLAPPs by providing a quick and inexpensive defense. It provides for a special motion that a defendant can file at the outset of a lawsuit to strike a complaint when it arises from conduct that falls within the rights of petition or free speech. The statute expressly applies to any writing or speech made in connection with an issue under consideration or review by a legislative, executive, or judicial proceeding, or any other official proceeding authorized by law, but there is no requirement that the writing or speech be promulgated directly to the official body. It also applies to speech in a public forum about an issue of public interest and to any other petition or speech conduct about an issue of public interest.

To win an anti-SLAPP motion, the defendant must first show that the lawsuit is based on constitutionally protected activity. Then, the burden shifts to the plaintiff, to affirmatively present evidence to show that they have a reasonable probability of prevailing on the action. The filing of an anti-SLAPP motion stays all discovery. This feature acts to greatly reduce the cost of litigation to the anti-SLAPP defendant, and can make beating the motion extremely difficult for the plaintiff, because they effectively must prove their case without the benefit of discovery.

If the special motion is denied, the order denying the motion is immediately appealable. Defendants prevailing on an anti-SLAPP motion (including any subsequent appeal) are entitled to a mandatory award of reasonable attorney’s fees. After an anti-SLAPP motion has been filed, a plaintiff cannot escape this mandatory fee award by amending its complaint. More than 300 published court opinions have interpreted and applied California's anti-SLAPP law.

California's Code of Civil Procedure § 425.17 corrects what the Legislature found to be abuse[5] of the anti-SLAPP statute (CCP § 425.16). Signed into law on September 6, 2003, this statute prohibits anti-SLAPP motions in response to certain public interest lawsuits and class actions, and actions that arise from commercial statements or conduct.[6] Section 425.18, signed into law on October 6, 2005, was enacted to facilitate SLAPP victims in recovering their damages through a SLAPPback (malicious prosecution action) against the SLAPP filers and their attorneys after the underlying SLAPP has been dismissed.

At least 26 other states and one territory have also enacted statutory protections against SLAPPs. These are Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Guam, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, and Washington. In Colorado and West Virginia, the courts have adopted protections against SLAPPs. These laws vary dramatically in scope and level of protection, and the remaining states lack protections.

There is no federal anti-SLAPP law. The extent to which state laws apply in federal courts is unclear, and the Circuit courts have reached different conclusions. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has allowed California litigants to use their state's special motion in federal district courts located in California, in cases where the court is hearing at least one California state law claim through the doctrine of supplemental jurisdiction. [2] However, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has held that the Massachusetts anti-SLAPP law, as a mere matter of procedure, does not apply in federal courts.[7]

It has been argued that the lack of uniform protection against SLAPPs has encouraged forum shopping, proponents of federal legislation have argued that the uncertainty about one's level of protection has likely magnified the chill of SLAPPs.

In December 2009, Rep. Steve Cohen introduced the Citizen Participation Act, H.R. 4364, in the U.S. House. This marks the first time the Congress has considered federal anti-SLAPP legislation (though the Congress is currently considering the closely related issue of libel tourism.) Like many state anti-SLAPP laws, H.R. 4364 would allow the defendant of a SLAPP to have the suit quickly dismissed and to recover fees and costs.

Balancing the Right of Access to the Courts

The SLAPP penalty stands as a barrier to access to the Courts by providing an early penalty to claimants who seek judicial redress. In recent years, the courts in some states have recognized that enforcement of SLAPP legislation must recognize and balance the constitutional rights of both litigants. It has been said:

Since the Magna Carta, the world has recognized the importance of justice in a free society. “To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice.” (Magna Carta, 1215.) This nation’s founding fathers knew people would never consent to be governed and surrender their right to decide disputes by force, unless government offered a just forum for resolving those disputes. Coucher & Kelly, The Social Contract from Hobbes to Rawls (1994).

The right to bring grievances to the courts, in good faith, is protected by state and federal constitutions in a variety of ways. In most states, the right to trial by jury in civil cases is recognized. The right to cross examine witnesses is fundamental to our judicial system. Moreover, the first amendment protects the right to petition the judiciary for grievances. The “right to petition extends to all departments of the Government. The right of access to the courts is indeed but one aspect of the right of petition.” California Motor Transport Co. v. Trucking Unlimited, 404 U.S. 508, 510 (1972) Because “the right to petition is ‘among the most precious of the liberties safeguarded by the Bill of Rights,’ ... the right of access to the courts shares this ‘preferred place’ in our hierarchy of constitutional freedoms and values. Harrison v. Springdale Water & Sewer Comm., 780 F.2d 1422, 1427 (8th Cir. 1986).” This balancing question is resolved differently in different states, often with substantial difficulty. See Denton v. Browns Mill Development Co, 561 S.E.2d 431 (Ga. 2002) and Browns Mill Development Co v. Denton, 543 S.E.2d 65 (Ga. App. 2000); EarthResources, LLC v. Morgan County, 638 S.E.2d 325 (Ga App. 2006); Alves v. Hometown Newspapers, Inc, 857 A.2d 743 (R.I.,2004) .

In Palazzo v. Ives, 944 A.2d 144 (R.I. 2008) the Court wrote:

By the nature of their subject matter, anti-SLAPP statutes require meticulous drafting. On the one hand, it is desirable to seek to shield citizens from improper intimidation when exercising their constitutional right to be heard with respect to issues of public concern. On the other hand, it is important that such statutes be limited in scope lest the constitutional right of access to the courts (whether by private figures, public figures, or public officials) be improperly thwarted. There is a genuine double-edged challenge to those who legislate in this area.

The most challenging balancing problem arises in application to SLAPP claims which do not sound in tort. The common law and constitutional law has developed in the United States to create a high substantive burden to tort and tort-like claims which seek redress for public speech, especially public speech which addresses matters of public concern. The common law in many states requires the pleader to state accurately the content of libelous words. Constitutional law has provided substantive protection which bars recovery against a first amendment defense except upon clear and convincing evidence that there has been deliberate or reckless falsehood. For this reason, ferreting out the bad faith SLAPP claim at an early stage of litigation should be accomplished with relative ease. Extension of the SLAPP penalties to factually complex cases, where the substantive standard of proof at common law is lower presents special challenges.

Notable SLAPPs

EuropeIn February 2005 the European Court of Human Rights found that Helen Steel and David Morris did not receive a fair trial while defending a libel action brought by McDonald's in the United Kingdom. In what became known as the McLibel case, the two had been found guilty in 1994 of libelling the company in a leaflet. The court ruled that, because legal aid is not available to libel defendants, their right to freedom of expression under the European Convention on Human Rights had been violated. They were awarded £24,000 damages, plus costs.

Nationally syndicated talk radio host Tom Martino prevailed in an anti-SLAPP motion after he was sued for libel by a watercraft retailer. The case received national attention for its suggestion that no one reasonably expects objective facts from a typical talk show host.[10][11] Gardner v. Martino

Kim Shewalter and other neighborhood activists, as defendants, won an anti-SLAPP motion against apartment building owners. The owners had filed a SLAPP suit because of the defendants' protest activities. Coltrain v. Shewalter

Barry King and another Internet poster, as defendants, won an anti-SLAPP motion against corporate plaintiffs based on critical posts on an Internet financial message board. Global Telemedia v. DoesKathi Mills won an anti-SLAPP motion against the Atlanta Humane Society, Atlanta Humane Society v. Mills, in Gwinnett County (Georgia) Superior Court; case 01-A-13269-1 [12]

Karen Winner, the author of "Divorced From Justice," published in 1996 by ReganBooks/Harper Collins, is recognized as "[the] catalyst for the changes that we adopted," said Leo Milonas, a retired justice with the Appellate Division of the New York state courts who chaired a special commission that recommended the changes adopted by Chief Judge Judith Kaye.[13] But in 1999, Winner, along with a psychologist/whistleblower, and several citizens were SLAPPed for criticizing the guardian ad litem system and a former judge in South Carolina. Winner's report, "Findings on Judicial Practices & Court-appointed Personnel In The Family Courts In Dorchester, Charleston & Berkeley Counties, South Carolina" and citizen demonstrations led to the very first laws in South Carolina to establish minimum standards and licensing requirements for guardians ad litem — who represent the interests of children in court cases.[14] The retaliatory SLAPPs have been dragging on for nearly 10 years, with judgments totaling more than $11 million against the co-defendants collectively. Reflecting the retaliatory nature of these suits, at least one of the co-defendants is still waiting to find out from the judges, which particular statements if any he made were actually false.[15]

From 1981 to 1986, Pacific Legal Foundation and San Luis Obispo filed a suit attempting to obtain the mailing list of the Abalone Alliance to get the group to pay for the police costs of the largest anti-nuclear civil-disobedience act in U.S. history at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. Pacific Legal Foundation lost at every court level and withdrew the suit the day before it was due to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. San Luis Obispo County v. Abalone Alliance

In March 2009, MagicJack (company who promotes a USB VOIP device) filed a defamation suit against Boing Boing for exposing their unfair and deceptive business tactics regarding their EULA, visitor counter, and 30 day trial period. This was dismissed as a SLAPP by a California judge in late 2009. In the resulting ruling, MagicJack was made responsible for most of Boing Boing's legal cost. MagicJack Legal DocumentsIn the case Comins vs. VanVoorhis a Florida man named Christopher Comins filed a defamation suit against a University of Florida grad student after the student blogged about a video of Comins repeatedly shooting someone's pet dogs. This was cited as an example of a SLAPP suit by the radio show "On the Media". [16]

Jackson Stephens exemplified the requisites for an unstoppable self-made billionaire. Visionary, charismatic, and intrepid pathfinder for those in power seeking, like himself, greater wealth and influence as sole moral imperatives.

He reached the status of global-power broker nearly a half century before his death in 2005 at the age of 83. His impact, however lives on, in the government insider firms run by his son Warren, and in weakened US security from the covert deals he arranged between US Presidents and foreign despots.

As head of the largest investment bank off Wall Street, he increased the personal wealth of three eagerly compromised Presidents, in exchange for nuclear and information control technologies.

From a small farm in Little Rock, Arkansas, Stephens joined his brother’s investment company in 1947, after graduating the Naval Academy with classmates Jimmy Carter and future CIA Director Stansfield Turner.

Successful ventures in energy, finance and media parlayed into mega scores, when he arranged the underwriting of Wal-Mart in 1970, then funded Tyson Food’s takeover of Holly Farms.

Along the way he covered his bets, as a financial problem solver for national politicians of both parties. In the ‘80s, he was Arkansas Governor Clinton’s go-to fundraiser. In return, Stephens’ firm handle 70% of all Arkansas public-works bond issues.

He teamed up with China-born billionaire Mochtar Riady, who, along with his son James, would later be convicted of secretly funding Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns with $ millions from the Chinese government.

During those same years, equal opportunist Stephens also arranged Mideast bankers’ multi $million bailouts for George W. Bush’s failing oil ventures.

Stephens’ firm, Systematics, secured a US beach-head for the infamous Bank of Commerce and Credit International. Before its $20 billion collapse in 1991, BCCI laundered money for dictators, terrorists, drug lords and illicit operations of intelligence agencies, including the CIA (most notably the Iran-Contra guns/cash/drugs transactions).

The effort started in the late ‘70s. Stephens brought Bert Lance, President Jimmy Carter’s soon indicted former budget director, together with BCCI principals including Agha Hasan Abedi, Ghaith Pharoan and Khalid Mahfouz (all later criminally charged as well). After 9/11, they and many of their Arabian banking colleagues were directly linked to, or themselves named Specifically Designated Global Terror financiers

After years of complex scheming to circumvent regulatory hurdles, Stephens’ and Lance’s labors paid off. BCCI gained entry into the US banking system and its safeguard systems, through clandestine control of Financial General Bankshares (FGB), a major DC-based banking institution.

At the same time, the BCCI tycoons bought Lance’s interest in FGB subsidiary National Bank of Georgia, from which he had loaned himself and Jimmy Carter several $million. BCCI set up “consultant “ contracts and new terms for the loans’ repayment, along with millions more donated to Carter’s chosen charities.

Stephens’ BCCI incursion, and his other ventures were represented by Hillary Clinton and her Arkansas law firm partners Vince Foster (later White House Counsel before death by reported suicide), and Webster Hubbell (later #3 in the US Justice Department before serving 20 months on multiple fraud convictions). While Clinton was Arkansas Governor, Stephens’ billionaire buddies, the Riadys, bonded with Bill and Hillary through their global conglomerate (and Chinese government partner), the Lippo Group. James Riady moved to Little Rock to be closer to his new friends.

In 1983, the Riadys launched their first business venture in Arkansas: The Lippo Finance & Investment Inc. The following year, Lippo ,and everyone’s friend Jackson Stephens partnered to buy control of Arkansas’ Worthen Bank Corp. In 1991, a $2.5 million Worthen loan (never repaid), would rescue Clinton’s Presidential campaign. Hillary and her law partners naturally handled Worthen, and other China-partnered Lippo matters as well. In 1985, Worthen Bank was indicted for extending several million dollars' worth of illegal, preferential loans to companies owned by the Riadys and Stephens.

A fire of “unknown causes” broke out in the bank at 3am, destroying all the records sought by the prosecutors. Worthen and another Lippo-China bank were given “cease and desist” orders from making such “dangerous loans” in the future. The criminal case was settled, and the loans to Stephens and the Riadys were never repaid. In 1987, Stephens’ ecumenical spirit helped arrange a $25 million bailout of George W. Bush’s floundering oil venture, Harken Energy, through his very same BCCI buddies, in partnership with the Union Bank of Switzerland.

Stephens gave $100,000 to the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980, another $100,000 to the Bush dinner committee in 1990, and was a Bush Ranger (minimum $200, 000) for Bush in 2000 and 2004. But through the first half of the ‘90s, Stephens, and his China-tied Lippo partners’ favorite recipient was Bill Clinton. Stephens was Clinton’s 2nd biggest contributor over his political career.

Toward the end of his first term, over fierce Congressional and Defense Department objections, Clinton ended major restrictions against military technology transfers to China. The US-China trade imbalance grew enormously, and Chinese nuclear weapon espionage, as documented in Congressional reports, grew rampant.

This while Clinton’s re-election campaign received $ millions, which were later traced back to foreign sources, mainly China.

In 1993, Clinton appointed Lippo Sr.VP John Huang as Assistant Deputy Secretary of the US Commerce Department. With only a perfunctory background check, Huang was given Top Security clearance, actually approved five months before he took office. Congressional probes later revealed that while installed at Commerce, Assistant Deputy Secretary Huang spent most afternoons at Stephens’ corporate offices, and was in constant contact with the Lippo Group, as well as with Chinese government officials.

Stephens’ Systematics, meanwhile, reportedly utilized a cutting edge computer program named PROMIS, secretly equipped with “back door control” ability, in IT management contracts with banks across the country. Systematics merged with telecom giant Alltel just before Clinton’s Presidency. Stephens data mining company, Acxiom, continued rolling in “sensitive” government contracts through the Clinton and George W administrations. Acxiom was the aggregator of US citizens’ private information for the Bush Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, headed by John Poindexter, convicted of conspiracy in the ‘80s Iran/Contra scheme. In a 2005 government contract, Acxiom, along with Alltel/Systematics’ major vendor Qsent, and Choicepoint (which falsely disqualified tens of thousands of Florida Democrats in the 2000 Presidential election), merged extensive private information about 100 million US citizens. They illegally gave the data to the TSA, which then transferred it to IBM. The TSA explained it all as an unfortunate series of mistakes.

*** Note – In 1997, IBM joined with a small new firm named Ptech, to create the “Unified Modeling Language” UML as the common parlance for integrated software coding.

Ptech, though known by FBI Bin Laden Unit Chief (later whistleblower) Robert Wright to be headed by a major Al Qaeda financier, and funded by Stephens’ former BCCI colleagues, was placed in charge of software management at every critical US Government agency- Defense, State, Justice, Energy, Transportation, the White House itself.

Ptech and a quasi government entity named MITRE, utilized PROMIS software to create the FAA’s National Airspace System, in control of operations on 911.

Stephens’ Acxiom Board of Directors reflected his cultivated Democratic Party dealings. The Board included former Clinton Chief of Staff “Mack” McClarty, former NATO Commander(and one time Democratic candidate) Wesley Clark and former Lippo Sr Exec Stephen Patterson.

When the Democrats gained control of Congress in 2006, both Alltel and Acxiom joined in formation to unfurl their primary team colors.

Within the same week in ‘07, each was acquired by TPG/Newbridge Capital, co-chaired by US Senator Diane Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum.

Senator Feinstein (D-Ca) is in perfect position to be of service. She is Chair of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, and member of the Appropriations Subcommittees for Defense and Intelligence.

The awful legacy of Jackson Stephens’ spectral empire, now controlled by his son Warren, seems secure.

Acxiom is a global interactive marketing services company that uses consumer data, analytics, information technology, data integration, and consulting solutions to help companies conduct direct marketing programs. Acxiom’s interactive capabilities allow marketers to have direct interaction and response with consumers, and these services include direct-mail, e-mail, mobile advertising, display advertising, social media, and Web-site personalization.[1] It has been described as "one of the biggest companies you've never heard of."[2]

In addition to collecting detailed information about people, the company helps marketers anticipate the future needs of consumers, according to the documentary "The Persuaders." As the world's largest processor of consumer data,[3] Acxiom has identified 70 types of consumers with its segmentation product PersonicX.

Acxiom is first and foremost a multi-channel marketing-services company powered by data. Forrester Research, the technology research company, considers Acxiom “a technology powerhouse” with deep industry expertise across a multitude of industries. Acxiom has traditionally been known for helping many of the world's largest financial services companies conduct direct marketing campaigns, but now more than 75 percent of its revenue is derived from non-financial services clients. Today, Acxiom is a $1.38 billion-a-year company, representing more than 12 percent of the direct-marketing-services sector’s $11 billion in estimated annual sales.

History

Founded as Demographics in 1969 by Charles D. Ward in Conway, Arkansas, Acxiom is headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas.[10]

The company has additional U.S. offices in Chicago, Illinois; New York, New York; Foster City, California; and Nashville, Tennessee. International offices are located in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Poland, Australia, and China. Services are also available to companies in scores of other countries.[1]

In early 2004, Acxiom acquired part of Claritas, a major European data provider.[11]

In 2005, Acxiom acquired Digital Impact and integrated its digital and online services into its business.

In early 2006, EMC Corporation acquired Acxiom’s information grid software in a $30 million deal.[12]

On May 16, 2007, Acxiom agreed to be bought by leading investment firms Silver Lake Partners and ValueAct Capital in an all-cash deal valued at $3 billion, including the assumption of about $756 million of debt.[13] However on October 1, 2007, a press release announced that the takeover agreement was to be terminated and Charles Morgan would retire as Acxiom’s Company Leader upon the selection of a successor.

On January 17, 2008, Acxiom named John Meyer (from Alcatel-Lucent) as new CEO and President, effective February 4, 2008.[14]

On October 9, 2008, Acxiom announced it had entered into a long-term exclusive contract with XSellNet[1] to deliver and manage the distribution of real-time customer data and analytics to the retail auto dealer industry throughout the United States. The collaboration is co-branded as X12 powered by Acxiom.

Controversy

In 2003, the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint before the Federal Trade Commission against Acxiom and JetBlue Airways, alleging the companies provided consumer information to Torch Concepts, a company hired by the United States Army "to determine how information from public and private records might be analyzed to help defend military bases from attack by terrorists and other adversaries."[16]

According to the complaint, Acxiom's activities constituted unfair and deceptive trade practices, as "Acxiom has publicly represented its belief that individuals should have notice about how information about them is used and have choices about that dissemination, and has stated that it does not permit clients to make non-public information available to individuals," and Acxiom proceeded to sell information to Torch Concepts without obtaining consent, an ability to opt-out, or furnishing notice to the affected consumers.

The FTC took no action against Acxiom, which had responded that it had followed its privacy principles and was not deceptive in its business practices. "Torch Concepts was acting under contract to the Department of Defense in their efforts to research ways to improve military base security," a company spokesman said. "Our policy clearly states that we 'provide information products which include financial information, Social Security number and other related information where permitted by law,' and that this information is 'provided to government agencies for the purposes of verifying information, employment screening and assisting law enforcement.'"[17]

In 2005 Acxiom was a nominee for the Big Brother Awards for Worst Corporate Invader for a tradition of data brokering.[18]

Security Breaches

In 2003, over 1.6 billion customer records were stolen during the transmission of information to and from Acxiom's clients; the information included names, addresses, and email addresses. Acxiom's firewall was not breached, and no databases were accessed by the hackers.[19] Prosecutors described the 2006 case against the hacker accused of stealing the data as the "largest ever invasion and theft of personal data" ever tried.[20] The stolen data only came to light during an investigation of a separate data theft incident.[21]

Based on their investigation, prosecutors said there was no risk of identity theft or harm to individuals based on the breaches. They also praised Acxiom for being aggressive in pursuing the hackers and cooperating with authorities. "The positive outcome of this investigation is testament to the strong partnerships we have established with our counterparts at the headquarters and field offices of various organizations, from the FBI and Department of Justice to the Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Attorneys' Office in Little Rock," said K.C. Crowley, Special Agent in Charge of Secret Service's Little Rock Field Office. "Furthermore, I commend Acxiom Corporation for their cooperation and responsible approach to the situation. Acxiom's quick response in contacting federal investigators after determining there had been a network intrusion should serve as a model for others in similar circumstances."[22] The two primary hackers were sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

HistoryThe company was formerly called Donrey Media Group, which was founded by Arkansas media mogul Donald W. Reynolds and based in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Reynolds died in 1993. The company was then sold to the Stephens family of Arkansas, best known for their investment banking business Stephens Inc. in Little Rock.

HistoryStephens Inc. was founded in 1933 by W.R. Witt Stephens. His brother, Jackson T. Stephens joined the firm in 1946 and served as Chairman of the Board and CEO of Stephens Inc. from 1956 to 1986. Since 1986 Warren Stephens, Jack's son, has served as CEO of Stephens Inc. In 1970, Stephens Inc. (along with Wall Street firm White Weld & Co.) brought Wal-Mart public in an IPO. [Clinton/Wal-Mart/Mena, Arkansas]

Quick factsEmploys over 700 people.Has 24 offices worldwide.Since the beginning of 1999, has led or co-managed 50 public offerings, raising over $13.2 billion, and delivered 38 fairness opinions.Over the last 5 years, has advised clients on over 120 merger and acquisition transactions with aggregate transaction value in excess of $43 billion dollars.The CEO is Warren Stephens.Financier of Dickey-Stephens Park, which plays home to the Arkansas Travelers baseball team.

A fairness opinion is a professional evaluation by an investment bank or other third party as to whether the terms of a merger, acquisition, buyback, spin-off, or going private are fair.[1] It is rendered for a fee.[2][3]

Controversy

Controversy in financial and management circles surrounds the question of the objectivity of fairness opinions, as one aspect of the duty of care in the fairness of a transaction. A potential exists for a conflict of interest when an entity rendering an opinion may benefit from the transaction either directly or indirectly[4]. Directors and officers of the companies also may have an interest in the outcome of the proposed transaction[5]. In response, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (then the National Association of Securities Dealers) issued its Rule 2290 to require disclosure by its members to minimize abuses[6]; this was approved in 2007 by the Securities and Exchange Commission[7].

Equity and fairness

Stockholder lawsuits are in the courts[8]. The Delaware Court of Chancery has required sufficient disclosures to “provide a balanced, truthful account of all matters”[9] and said “When a document ventures into certain subjects, it must do so in a manner that is materially complete and unbiased by the omission of material facts.”[10] In a Memorandum Opinion in the CheckFree/Fiserv merger Chancellor Chandler underlined that the earlier In re Pure Resources Court had established the proper frame of analysis for disclosure of financial data: “[S ]tockholders are entitled to a fair summary of the substantive work performed by the investment bankers upon whose advice the recommendations of their board as to how to vote on a merger or tender rely.”[11] According to the certification hypothesis fairness opinions may also serve the interest of the shareholders by mitigating informational asymmetries in corporate transactions. [12] First empirical evidence of fairness opinions in Europe indicates their relevance for shareholders [13].

Fairness Opinions are billion dollar mechanisms for some of the largest bank mergers ever. If people found out the conflicts of interest in these "Fairness Opinions", the house of cards may come tumbling down.

"Worthen Banking Corp. was sold to Boatmen's Bancshares Inc. of St. Louis in 1995 for $535 million. Members of the Stephens family owned 22 percent of Worthen at the time of the sale, and acquired shares in Boatmen's. In addition, the investment bank Stephens Inc. retained the right to handle the trades Submitted by fedup 2007-12-15 00:29:15

(and to collect commissions) for Worthen Investments, which was folded into Boatman's Investment Services, Boatman's securities subsidiary. (All other securities trades at Boatman's Investment Services are handled by Pershing Inc. of New Jersey.) (4)

10/10/96 "Currently, Boatman's Bancshares Inc. is being acquired for around $9 billion by NationsBank Corp. of Charlotte, N.C. This merger will make NationsBank the fourth largest U.S. banking franchise. The investment bank Stephens Inc. was brought in to give a "fairness opinion" on behalf of NationsBank Corp. shareholders, even though the Stephens family, through their Boatmen's stock holdings, stand to make more than $200 million on the acquisition. Also standing to gain on stock holdings is Curt Bradbury, the chief operating officer at Stephens Inc., and also the former chief executive of Worthen Bank. Stephens Inc. represented NationsBank in the merger negotiations, while Goldman Sachs represented Boatmen's. NationsBank has its own discount brokerage service, NationsBank Discount Brokerage Inc., which clears its trades through Stephens Inc. Stephens Inc. is trying to acquire all of NationsBank's brokerage business after the merger of Boatmen's and NationsBank is complete. If so, that would make Stephens Inc. the largest clearing firm for banks in the U.S. (4)

Subsequently, NationsBank was acquired by BankAmerica [Alamo-Girl]

"It turns out that he [John Huang] maintained an office across the street from his Commerce Department office. He used that office to send and receive packages and faxes without the knowledge of his Commerce employers…. That office was maintained by none other than the Arkansas-based Stephens Inc., a partner of Lippo in the Arkansas WorthenBank, where John Huang had once served as a vice president. The secretary testifying about John Huang's clandestine visits to the office was one Paula Green, a former aide to Rep. Beryl Anthony, the brother-in-law of the late Vince Foster. Beryl Anthony, as a member of the Washington law office of Winston Strawn, represented Stephens' software company Systematics, which was also represented by Vince Foster, Hillary Clinton and Joe Giroirin litigation with First American Bank in Washington over an attempted takeover by BCCI. It was revealed last week that none other than John Huang traveled to China to negotiate on behalf of Lippo with the Chinese government over debts owed to Chinese depositors by the failed BCCI…." (5)

One appointment in particular that should be setting off alarm bells right now is that of White House aide Vanessa Weaver, nominated by the White House for the five-member board of the Export-Import Bank. Ms. Weaver's rushed confirmation hearing takes place this afternoon before Senator Phil Gramm's Banking Committee. An article in yesterday's Investor's Business Daily noted that before Ms. Weaver replaced fellow Arkansan Patsy Thomasson as deputy personnel director at the White House in 1997, she was a senior adviser on personnel. The Thompson hearings on the 1996 campaign scandals established that in 1994 and 1995 she made at least 23 White House calls to John Huang while he worked at a sensitive Commerce Department job for 16 months. Incidentally, John Huang, long of the Lippo Group, qualifies as another typically weird appointment..... Mr. Huang has said he and Ms. Weaver are "good friends." That may stem in part from his friendship with her father Vernon, who for 15 years was head of the Washington office of the Arkansas-based Stephens Inc. financial empire. The two men were sufficiently close that Mr. Huang used a Stephens suite at the Willard Hotel as a "satellite office," even though it was only 150 yards from the Commerce Department. Mr. Huang would use the office to pick up overnight packages, make phone calls and fax materials, often shortly after receiving classified briefings. Mr. Weaver's secretary has testified before the Senate that her boss gave her orders to conceal the arrangement with Mr. Huang. Mr. Weaver made at least 27 calls to Mr. Huang during his stint at Commerce. An Arkansas native, Mr. Weaver was later appointed by President Clinton as ambassador to the European Union in Brussels. A congressman well versed in the details of the Huang case told us the timing and pace of the Weaver family's contacts with him were "highly suspicious" and may have involved campaign fundraising.. . (39)

This could be a banking/Mena shakedown of speech. That may be why they are going after marijuana/gun sites too (they stand in the way of the Banking-Drug cartels). You got BoA, Boatman, Bradbury, Nations, Goldman, Clinton, Huang, Weaver, Foster, BCCI, etc.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton cites her experience as a compelling reason voters should make her president, but nearly 2 million pages of documents covering her White House years are locked up in a building here, obscuring a large swath of her record as first lady. Clinton's calendars, appointment logs and memos are stored at her husband's presidential library, in the custody of federal archivists who do not expect them to be released until after the 2008 presidential election. ...

[E]ven in the healthcare documents, at least 1,000 pages involving her work has been censored by archives staff because they include confidential advice and must be kept secret under a federal law called the Presidential Records Act. Political consultants said that if Hillary Clinton's records were made public, rivals would mine them for scraps of information that might rattle her campaign. ...Asked how long it might be before Hillary Clinton's records are released, the library's chief archivist said it could take years. ...Other records kept from public view include a 1993 memo to the first lady entitled "positioning ourselves on healthcare," and another from that year called "public portrayal of the Medicare program."

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

c) Two witnesses told the team they saw George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush at the Essex County, New Jersey airport with Israeli Mossad agent Michael Harari and another Mossad agent who were both seen standing next to JFK Jr.’s Cessna--all four were at the airport just two days before the doomed plane took off with JFK, Jr., his pregnant wife and her sisterd) Several witnesses testified they overheard the murder plot being discussed in the White House oval officee) One ‘company’ (CIA) witness at the scene saw the bodies and the damaged plane and told the team a mid-air explosion caused the crash f) Approximately 150 witnesses gave individual depositions and signed statements for the final reportg) Three flight instructors who worked with JFK Jr. testified he was an excellent pilot and had logged a huge number of flying hours since being licensed--he loved to fly and was that good.”

Delbert told us “At the end of July, 1999, during the final phase of our investigation, we talked to several individual sources in the White House who consented to be interviewed as witnesses.”

“We included their testimony in the final draft of the report which was classified until 2025--not currently available to any living individual,“ said the former operative.

“Since concrete evidence of a plot involving three presidents and a current senator in the assassination of John F. Kennedy’s son--who the report said they perceived as a political threat and future rival--would not exactly inspire public confidence in the government, it’s probable that the American people will never see our final un-redacted report,” said Delbert, “unless there are grand jury murder indictments and a public trial.”

The Players

“The White House sources we interviewed overheard conversations involving individuals who made the decision to murder JFK, Jr.,” said Delbert, who joined three Division 4 fellow operatives and two other federal agency officials in alleging the following names in the final classified report as having participated in planning the murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr. after the team had interviewed all the witnesses involved in the case:

The Division 4 team member told us “The meeting to discuss the murder occurred in the White House oval office. The subjects named in the report who participated in ordering the murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr. were President Clinton and his wife Hillary--both in the room, former Attorney General Janet Reno--also in the room and who JFK Jr. had publicly called to task for her role in Waco and Ruby Ridge operations, FBI Director Louis Freeh--in the room, and former President George H. W. Bush, Lawrence Rockefeller (now deceased), and three Inner Circle Council of Thirteen members who were all teleconferenced into the oval office discussion via secure White House phone lines.“

Quietly taken aback by the revelations, we asked Delbert to summarize the content of the alleged oval office murder plot overheard by the team's interviewed witness sources, including witnesses assigned to White House domestic security:

“a) Conversation about JFK Jr.’s magazine GEORGE becoming a political vehicle which could threaten ruling elite families and expose past White House crimesb) Discussions about blowing up his Cessna, John Jr.’s vulnerability and even carelessness about his plane’s security when warned that suspicious individuals had previously been seen lurking around his plane at the airportc) Attorney General Reno’s problems with JFK Jr. criticizing Waco and Ruby Ridged) Speculation about who John Jr. would pick to run against in 2000--Hillary Clinton or George W. Bush e) Discussion about political family factions and relationships between federal law enforcement, national security and intelligence agencies f) Discussion about how the assassination would take place, starting at the airport--with specific Mossad agents named by the subject conspirators without mentioning the actual Israeli agency g) General agreement that John, Jr. had become over-zealous in planning to employ GEORGE to circuitously expose those who were behind the assassination of his father.”

White House-controlled foreign assassination teams in America

As we listened without comment, the Division 4 operative continued: “We were told by the same White House sources we interviewed that FBI Director Freeh left the oval office after the murder plot was discussed and met with Israeli Mossad agent Michael Harari who then met with his supervisor, General Rafael Eitan, considered to be one of the most dangerous Israeli agents who ever lived,” stated Delbert.

Delbert explained that testimony by White House and airport witnesses and others will provide outrageous but credible grand jury evidence that three United States presidents have their own private Israeli Mossad assassins--as well as assassins from several American federal government agencies--and will use them to commit treason and murder against other Americans perceived to pose a political threat to their power, a fact surely to horrify Jewish-Americans and all U.S. citizens. “I had heard that even our own FBI agents literally trembled at the fear of being assigned to watch General Eitan’s movements, since collaborating congressional oversight allowed him to freely enter the United States at any time, using passports under a different name,” the Division 4 special investigative team member said.

[One of the most outrageous documents this writer has ever seen, confirming the existence of Michael Harari and his nefarious Bush-connected activities, was the Colonel Cutolo / Colonel Corone Court Deposition, which we found on www. stewwebb.com.]

Delbert continued his shocking narrative, “About three days before John’s plane took off and exploded in mid-air, Michael Harari, and another Mossad agent were seen with former President George H. W. Bush and his son Texas Governor George W. Bush at the Essex County, New Jersey airport where John Jr. kept his plane.” This fact was also confirmed by separate U.S. intelligence sources who are also willing to testify before a grand jury.[click here to read more about Harari’s U.S. activities in the Cutolo Affadavit.htm also found at stewwebb.com]

“All four were positively identified by an aircraft mechanic and a maintenance worker we interviewed for the final classified report; but we didn’t include their names or the names of some other key witnesses so that there would be citizens left to testify in case the Clintons or Bushes started having people murdered,” said the former Special Forces member.

Delbert’s chilling words provided concrete and credible proof that congressional oversight over counterfeit immigration documents acquired by assassins and terrorists, wide-open U.S. borders and homeland “security“ is so seriously flawed, broken down and corrupted that Senate and House members are permitting known foreign murderers to move around America at will.

Given the state-side depletion of National Guard and Reserve troops which renders the U.S. more vulnerable to foreign enemies while pre-emptive war based on lies is being fought, the physical and economic security of the nation is problematic enough to assert that Senate and House members may literally be conspiring against their own constituents in favor of a clandestine world-wide agenda supported by assassination of “troublemakers,” political or otherwise.

The American-French Alliance (AFA), a tightly-knit and hushed organization of active intelligence community patriots from both countries, is said to be waging an under-the-radar-screen war to stop rogue elements and assassins in the FBI, CIA, DOD and DIA--supervised by the White House and directly linked to Al Qaeda and former CIA operative Tim Osman (also known as Osama bin Laden) but also British MI-6 agents from engaging in black operations throughout the United States.

According to intelligence sources who spoke with federal whistleblower Stewart Webb, the AFA reportedly killed General Eitan in October, 2004 for his role in stealing the U.S. atomic nuclear codes from the National Security Archives.

TomFlocco.com and other websites have previously reported circumstances surrounding an attempt by eight rogue British MI-6 agents to blow up the Chicago subway underneath the Everett Dirksen Federal Building where federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and a grand jury are investigating multiple crimes and treason linked to the White House.

The physical evidence

“The preliminary Division 4 team report was written with my partner who has retired and returned to his own country. We were joined by two others from our team and two more from another federal agency in putting together the final report,” said Delbert.

“Our boss ordered us to re-write the final draft but we refused. We wanted to tell the truth; so they classified the (final report) until the year 2025 despite the fact that we had interviewed scores of witnesses who can corroborate all of our findings. This was August 5, 1999.”

“The obstruction of justice by our ‘upper management’ and the FBI caused so much chaos that they dissolved our team; then they, quite possibly along with the Clinton White House, tried to have me murdered within ten weeks at the end of October, 1999 while working in Belfast, Ireland. I was supposed to be in a car with a friend who was blown apart in the explosion,“ said Delbert.

“That explosion was meant either as a warning or an assassination attempt, and cost the life of not only my associate, but a friend of his as well; so I closed all my accounts, resigned from Division 4 and went underground by November, 1999, for six months,” he said--but not before devastating reports had been filed by a team of investigators experienced in tracking evidence and criminals all over the world:

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

Guess what...Stephens, Inc. (the ones behind Ptech and BCCI and likely this nonsensical fraudulent legislation about internet censorship) got all the Nazi corporatists together for more tyrannical fun...this time planning to profit from rebuilding America and providing emergency transportation, logistics, medical services and a complete JERICHO TV scenario (now that they finished the job in the middle east).

Just investigate this for yourselves...

Who was at the Stephens circle jerk over the last few days planning trucking/train logistics, electronic warfare on Americans, and content management of propaganda?

Landstar System, Inc. (Nasdaq: LSTR), a non-asset based provider of integrated supply chain solutions delivering safe, specialized transportation, warehousing and logistics services. Landstar System, Inc. is a non-asset based provider of integrated supply chain solutions. Landstar delivers safe, specialized transportation, warehousing and logistics services to a broad range of customers worldwide utilizing a network of agents, third-party capacity owners and employees. All Landstar transportation companies are certified to ISO 9001:2008 quality management system standards and RC14001:2008 environmental, health, safety and security management system standards. http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/press/inc-fall-investment-conference,1541704.htmlUltralife, which began as a battery company, now offers products and services ranging from portable and standby power solutions to communications and electronics systems. Through its engineering and collaborative approach to problem solving, Ultralife serves government, defense and commercial customers across the globe.http://www.defenseprocurementnews.com/2010/11/08/ultralife-corporation-to-present-at-stephens-inc-fall-investment-conference/Knology, Inc. today announced that Rodger L. Johnson, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, and Todd Holt, President and Chief Financial Officer, of Knology, Inc., will give a Company presentation at the Stephens Inc. Fall Investment Conference in New York City. Knology Inc., headquartered in West Point, Georgia, is a leading provider of interactive communications and entertainment services in the Southeast, upper Midwest and Kansas regions. Knology serves both residential and business customers with one of the most technologically advanced broadband networks in the country. Innovative offerings include over 200 channels of digital cable TV, local and long distance digital telephone service with the latest enhanced voice messaging features, and high-speed Internet access, which enables consumers to quickly download video, audio and graphic files using a cable modem. Knology’s fiber-based business products include iPlex, which delivers Ethernet connections to an IP-PBX using Session Initiated Protocol (SIP) technology, Passive Optical Network (PON), which supplies IP architecture with segmented voice and data bandwidth, and Managed Integrated Network Solutions (MATRIX), an integrated IP-based technology which converges data and voice.http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Knology-to-Present-at-the-bw-1317774541.html?x=0&.v=1Ryder CFO to Address 2010 Stephens Inc. Fall Investment Conference MIAMI, FL--(Marketwire - November 10, 2010) - Ryder System, Inc. Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Art Garcia will present a company update at the 2010 Stephens Inc. Fall Investment Conference. Ryder is a FORTUNE 500® commercial transportation, logistics and supply chain management solutions company. Ryder's stock (NYSE: R) is a component of the Dow Jones Transportation Average and the Standard & Poor's 500 Index. Inbound Logistics magazine has recognized Ryder as the top third party logistics provider, and Security magazine has named Ryder the number-one company for security practices in the transportation, logistics, supply chain, and warehousing sector. Ryder is a proud member of the American Red Cross Annual Disaster Giving Program, supporting national and local disaster preparedness and response efforts. For more information on Ryder System, Inc., visit www.ryder.com.http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Ryder-CFO-to-Address-2010-Stephens-Inc-Fall-Investment-Conference-NYSE-R-1351383.htmGary L. McArthur, senior vice president and chief financial officer of Harris Corporation (NYSE: HRS), an international communications and information technology company, will be a featured speaker at the Stephens Inc. Fall Investment Conference. Company Profile. Harris is an international communications and information technology company serving government and commercial markets in more than 150 countries. Headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, the company has approximately $5 billion of annual revenue and more than 16,000 employees — including nearly 7,000 engineers and scientists. Harris is dedicated to developing best-in-class assured communications® products, systems, and services. RF Communications Defense Programs Civil Programs National Intelligence Programs IT Services Broadcast Communicationshttp://www.harris.com/webcast/mcarthur/2008-11-19/Globecomm Systems to Present at Stephens Inc. Fall Investment Conference in New York City HAUPPAUGE, N.Y. - (Business Wire) Globecomm Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: GCOM), a leading global provider of satellite-based managed network solutions, today announced it will present at the Stephens Inc. Fall Investment Conference. Globecomm Systems Inc., or Globecomm, is a leading global provider of satellite-based managed network solutions. Employing our expertise in emerging communication technologies we are able to offer a comprehensive suite of system integration, system products, and network services enabling a complete end-to-end solution for our customers. We believe our integrated approach of in-house design and engineering expertise combined with a world-class global network and our 24 by 7 network operating centers provides us a unique competitive advantage. We are now taking this value proposition to selective vertical markets, including government, wireless, media, enterprise, and maritime. As a network solution provider we leverage our global network to provide customers managed access services to the United States Internet backbone, video content, the public switched telephone network or their corporate headquarters, or government offices. We currently have customers for which we are providing such services in the United States, Europe, South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Based in Hauppauge, New York, Globecomm Systems also maintains offices in Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia, the Netherlands, South Africa, Hong Kong, Germany, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan. Globecomm Systems Awarded Subcontract from BECHTEL in Support of USAID's Iraq Infrastructure...http://www.allbusiness.com/company-activities-management/financial-performance/5811063-1.htmlhttp://www.earthtimes.org/articles/press/conference-new-york-city,1537068.htmlAngioDynamics (NASDAQ: ANGO), a leading provider of innovative medical devices for the minimally-invasive treatment of cancer and peripheral vascular disease, today announced that it will present at the Stephens Inc. Fall Investment Conference. Joseph Gersuk, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of AngioDynamics, will review the Company’s business strategy and recent corporate developments. AngioDynamics, Inc. is a leading provider of innovative medical devices used by interventional radiologists, surgeons and other physicians for the minimally-invasive treatment of cancer and peripheral vascular disease. AngioDynamics' diverse product lines include market-leading radiofrequency and irreversible electroporation ablation systems, vascular access products, angiographic products and accessories, dialysis products, angioplasty products, drainage products, thrombolytic products, embolization products and venous products. More information is available at www.angiodynamics.com.http://www.bioportfolio.com/news/article/256167/Angiodynamics-To-Participate-At-The-Stephens-Inc-Fall-Investment-Conference.htmlKansas City, Mo., November 10, 2010– Kansas City Southern (KCS) (NYSE: KSU) Vice President Investor Relations, William Galligan, will address the Stephens Inc. Fall Investment Conference. Headquartered in Kansas City, MO, Kansas City Southern is a transportation holding company that has railroad investments in the U.S., Mexico and Panama. Its primary U.S. holding is The Kansas City Southern Railway Company, serving the central and south central U.S. Its international holdings include Kansas City Southern de Mexico, S.A. de C.V., serving northeastern and central Mexico and the port cities of Lázaro Cárdenas, Tampico and Veracruz, and a 50 percent interest in Panama Canal Railway Company, providing ocean-to-ocean freight and passenger service along the Panama Canal. Kansas City Southern's North American rail holdings and strategic alliances are primary components of a NAFTA Railway system, linking the commercial and industrial centers of the U.S., Mexico and Canada.http://www.pressreleasepoint.com/kcs-william-galligan-address-stephens-inc-fall-investment-conferenceNCI Building Systems, Inc. (NYSE: NCS) today announced it will participate in the Stephens Inc. Fall Investment Conference. Norman C. Chambers, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, will deliver the Company's presentation. NCI Building Systems, Inc. is one of North America's largest integrated manufacturers of metal products for the nonresidential building industry. NCI is comprised of a family of companies operating manufacturing facilities across the United States and Mexico, with additional sales and distribution offices throughout the United States and Canada.http://www.pddnet.com/news-ap-nci-building-systems-to-present-at-stephens-inc-fa-111510/Pioneer Drilling To Present At The Stephens Inc. Fall Investment Conference. Lorne E. Phillips, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Pioneer Drilling, is scheduled to make a presentation to the conference. The presentation will provide an update on the Company’s operations and certain recent developments. Pioneer Drilling Company provides contract land drilling services to independent and major oil and gas operators in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kansas, the Rocky Mountain and Appalachian regions and internationally in Colombia through its Pioneer Drilling Services Division. The Company also provides workover rig, wireline and fishing and rental services to producers in the U.S. Gulf Coast, Mid-Continent, Rocky Mountain and Appalachian regions through its Pioneer Production Services Division. Its fleet consists of 71 land drilling rigs that drill at depths ranging from 6,000 to 25,000 feet, 74 workover rigs (69 550-horsepower rigs, four 600-horsepower rigs and one 400-horsepower rig), 82 wireline units, and fishing and rental tools.http://www.dailymarkets.com/energy/2010/11/15/pioneer-drilling-to-present-at-the-stephens-inc-fall-investment-conference/DXP Enterprises, Inc.(DXPE 20.86, -0.01, -0.05%) today announced that David Little, Chairman and CEO of DXP and Mac McConnell, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of DXP, will present at the Stephens Inc. Fall Investment Conference. DXP’s innovative pumping solutions provide engineering, fabrication and technical design to meet the capital equipment needs of its global customer base. DXP provides solutions by utilizing manufacturer authorized equipment and certified personnel. Pump packages require MRO and OEM equipment such as pumps, motors and valves, and consumable products. DXP leverages its MROP inventories and technical knowledge to lower the total cost and maintain the quality of the pump package.http://logisticsweek.com/news/2010/11/dxp-enterprises-to-present-at-stephens-inc-fall-investment-conference-on-november-16-2010/Mark D. Manion, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Norfolk Southern Corporation (NYSE: NSC | PowerRating), will address the Stephens Inc. Fall Investment Conference. Norfolk Southern Corporation (NYSE: NSC) is one of the nation's premier transportation companies. Its Norfolk Southern Railway subsidiary operates approximately 21,000 route miles in 22 states and the District of Columbia, serves every major container port in the eastern United States, and provides efficient connections to other rail carriers. Norfolk Southern operates the most extensive intermodal network in the East and is a major transporter of coal and industrial products.http://www.tradingmarkets.com/news/press-release/nsc_norfolk-southern-coo-manion-to-address-stephens-inc-fall-investment-conference-1268788.htmlVulcan Materials at Stephens, Inc. Fall Investment Conference. Dan Sansone, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, as well as Mark Warren, Director of Investor Relations.Vulcan Materials Company, based in Birmingham, Alabama, provides infrastructure materials that are required by the American economy. Vulcan is the nation's largest producer of construction aggregates, a major producer of other construction materials including asphalt and ready-mixed concrete and a leading producer of cement in Florida. Vulcan produces aggregates, primarily crushed stone, sand and gravel, that are used in nearly all forms of construction. In particular, large quantities of aggregates are used to build roads and nonresidential properties.http://ir.vulcanmaterials.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=87467&p=irol-EventDetails&EventId=3508226USG at Stephens, Inc. Fall Investment Conference. USG is a leader in each of its three core businesses. USG is number one in gypsum wallboard with about 30 percent of the North American market. USG leads this business with low cost capacity and market leading brands such as SHEETROCK brand wallboard, DUROCK brand cement boards and FIBEROCK gypsum fiber panel products. About a third of sales are from non-wallboard products. USG's worldwide ceilings business, whose products are primarily used in non-residential buildings, is the second largest in the industry. These businesses maintain a strong relationship with dealers which carry both ceilings and gypsum products. USG's building products distribution business, L&W Supply, is the only specialty gypsum dealer with a national presence. L&W's size (about $1.3 billion in revenues during 2009) gives it advantages from economies of scale not available to its primary competitors, which tend to be small, local independent dealers. L&W sold about 11 percent of all wallboard in the U.S. in 2009.http://investor.usg.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=115117&p=irol-eventDetails&EventId=3520417TAMPA, Fla., Nov 3, 2010 (GlobeNewswire via COMTEX) -- Quality Distribution, Inc. (QLTY 6.60, +0.14, +2.17%) ("Quality) announced that it will participate in the Stephens, Inc. Fall Investment Conference. At the conference, Gary Enzor, Chief Executive Officer, and Joe Troy, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, will present a general overview of Quality's business. Headquartered in Tampa, Florida, Quality operates the largest chemical bulk tank truck network in North America through its wholly-owned subsidiary, Quality Carriers, Inc., and is the largest North American provider of intermodal tank container and depot services through its wholly-owned subsidiary, Boasso America Corporation. Quality Carriers' network of independent affiliates and independent owner-operators provides nationwide bulk transportation and related services. Quality is an American Chemistry Council Responsible Care(R) Partner and is a core carrier for many of the Fortune 500 companies that are engaged in chemical production and processing.http://www.marketwatch.com/story/quality-distribution-inc-to-present-at-stephens-inc-fall-investment-conference-on-november-17-2010-2010-11-03-830360Kirby Corporation ("Kirby") (NYSE:KEX - News) announced today that Joe Pyne, Kirby's Chief Executive Officer, will present at the Stephens Inc. Fall Investment Conference. Kirby Corporation, based in Houston, Texas, operates inland tank barges and towing vessels transporting petrochemicals, black oil products, refined petroleum products and agricultural chemicals throughout the United States' inland waterway system. Kirby also owns and operates four ocean-going barge and tug units transporting dry-bulk commodities in United States coastwise trade. Through the diesel engine services segment, Kirby provides after-market service for medium-speed and high-speed diesel engines and reduction gears used in marine, power generation and railroad applications.http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Kirby-Corporation-to-Present-prnews-3269513251.html?x=0&.v=1Heartland Express, Inc. (Nasdaq:HTLD) announced that President and John Cosaert, Chief Financial Officer will present at the Stephens Inc., Fall Investment Conference. Heartland Express, Inc. is an irregular route truckload carrier of general commodities. The Company has built a solid reputation for providing superior service to the short to medium haul truckload market. Principal traffic lanes lie east of the Rocky Mountains however, the Company does provide select team service to the West Coast markets. The Company has expanded to the Western United States with a regional operating center in Phoenix, Arizona. The Company ended the year with a 78.4% operating ratio and cash, cash equivalents, and investments of $331.3 million. The Company's balance sheet continues to be debt-free.http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-171064894.html

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All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

Now Mike is a real piece of work. Since his "retirement" from the Mossad he has been working "on loan" to a number of Intelligence Agencies, including the CIA and British Intelligence. He served as a special advisor to Manuel Noriega in Panama. Guns for dope and contract killings are his specialty.

His being in the Philippines when Colonel Nick Rowe was assassinated made him a suspect in my book. From there he moved to Thailand and took up residence in the Oriental Hotel. He left after "someone" dropped a dime on him in broad daylight, that he was not wanted plying his trade in The Kingdom.

The Mossad is like the CIA and the Hotel California; "You can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave." Like Wilson and others, Harari is always working for "someone."

Now the question arises. Will Bill Clinton make sure that Mike Harari is arrested on US soil? Will his assets in the US be seized? Will the President impose on our allies to arrest Harari and send him to the bar of justice in Norway? The answer is "NO." Mike has been involved in too many "friendly" intelligence operations.

The reason Norway wants Harari is simple; he is the suspected mastermind behind the killing, by mistake, of Moroccan waiter Ahmed Bouchikhi as he walked home with his pregnant Norwegian wife. Seems a simple enough case. Harari killed the wrong guy and he is wanted. Not so fast. He has been known to have been involved since 1973. He has been allowed to ship a lot of guns, dope and kill a whole lot of people since then.

No agency can allow Mike Harari to go to trial. That would present some real problems. But to ignore him is unacceptable. Like Pol Pot, Mike is a killer. He has crossed the line a number of times from legitimate intelligence operations to just plain contract killing. But the President has an option. He could just hunt Mike down and kill him. There are some friends of Nick Rowe who would gladly take the job.

By the way, you might try Florida or California before looking overseas, Mr. President. I understand Canada made him feel unwelcome. He hasn't been to Arkansas since they closed that famous airport. So you don't have to look there, Mr. President. You shouldn't have any trouble identifying him, Mr. Clinton, you have met him yourself.

Copyright 1998, by Mark A. Smith, Major, USA, Retired

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

536 pages of CIA, State Department, Defense Department, FBI Files, and three hour-thirty-six minutes of White House recordings related to the Munich Olympic Massacre, Black September Organization, and Palestinian Hijackings archived on CD-ROM.

The modern age of terrorism was ushered in by the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany. At approximately 4:00 AM on September 5, 1972, Palestinian gunmen entered the complex containing the Olympic Village apartments. The gunmen made their way to apartment one and inserted a passkey. After successfully entering the apartment they captured five Israeli athletes. The terrorists expanded their search throughout the complex, capturing six additional athletes in apartment number three. By approximately 5:00 AM, the terrorists had killed two Israeli team members and captured nine. Due to an unanticipated battle and chaos, the terrorists failed to locate eight additional team members in apartments two, four, and five. Two other Israeli athletes in apartment one escaped and made their way to safety.

The Palestinian off-shoot group, the Black September Organization, claimed responsibility for the actions at the Village Apartments. The terrorists demanded the release and safe passage to Egypt of 234 Palestinians and non-Arabs jailed in Israel, and an additional two German terrorists in German prisons. The Black September Group requested a jet to transport them to Cairo where the prisoners demanded for release by Israel would meet them. The German police determined that in order to conduct a successful hostage rescue, they had to confine the terrorists to Germany. To initiate a rescue, they decided the best option was to isolate the terrorists at Germany's Furstenfeldbruck Airport. Once at the airfield, West German snipers would attempt a hostage rescue operation.

It was only after the arrival at the airport that the West German Police realized there were eight terrorists, not the five originally estimated. Considering the early estimate of five terrorists, the police deployed only five German snipers at Furstenfeldbruck airport to initiate the rescue. The German police placed a dummy Lufthansa Boeing 727 at Furstenfeldbruck airport, located approximately fifteen miles from the center of Munich. Eight police officers deployed around the jet dressed as flight attendants and crew members. These police officers were without radio contact with the command post or other police units.

As the terrorists moved a 'safe' distance from the hostages, the police snipers were ordered to open fire. Their initial rounds went off-target and a full gun battle ensued. The Israeli captives were still sitting bound in the helicopters which had transported them to the airfield. The initial firefight between the fedayeen and police lasted approximately an hour and fifteen minutes. The German Police decided to initiate an 'infantry' attack to move the terrorists from the vicinity of the helicopters. As the attack began, one fedayeen tossed a grenade into one of the helicopters holding five of the Israeli athletes. The helicopter exploded, killing all five athletes. Shortly thereafter, another fedayeen member entered the second helicopter, shot, and killed the last four hostages. Three of the surviving kidnappers lay on the ground and were captured by police. Jamal Al-Gashey had been shot through his right wrist, and Mohammed Safady had sustained a flesh wound to his leg. Adnan Al-Gashey had escaped injury completely. Yusuf Nazzal, the final kidnapper, had escaped the scene, but was tracked down using dogs and tear gas 40 minutes later, and was shot dead after a brief gunfight.

Palestinian guerrilla group, The Black September Organization (BSO), claimed responsibility for the killing of the eleven Israelis in Munich. The Fatah originated in 1957 and boasted an estimated membership of over 11,000 by the late 1980's. The United States Department of State's 1988 publication of Terrorist Group Profiles, describes the Fatah as the military arm of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Fatah is an acronym spelled backwards representing Harakat al-Tahrir al Filistini. The phrase translates as Palestine Liberation Movement. Former Fatah leader Yasir Arafat (Abu Ammar) assumed leadership of the PLO in 1969. The Fatah utilized the name Black September Organization from approximately 1971 to 1974.

On October 29, a German Lufthansa jet was hijacked and demands were made for the release of the three Black September members being held for trial. Safady and the Al-Gasheys were immediately released by Germany and flown to Libya. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and the Israeli Defense Committee made a decision, secretly authorizing the Mossad to track down and assassinate those responsible for the Munich massacre.CIA FILES

117 Pages of CIA files related to the Munich Olympic Massacre. Files are composed of Central Intelligence Bulletins and Weekly Terrorism Reviews dating from September 6, 1972 to December 3, 1984. Includes 57 pages of CIA briefings for the two months after the attack addressing: CIA assessment of Israel's likely response. Effect on West Germany's self-esteem and its upcoming elections. Response of Arab states to the murders. Information about Israeli strikes against Fadayeen installations. Israeli actions in Lebanon and the Lebanese response. DEFENSE DEPT. FILES

Countering Terrorism: The Israeli Response to the 1972 Munich Olympic Massacre and the Development of Independent Covert Action Teams.

A 48 page study published by the Marine Corps Command and Staff College in 1995. The purpose of this study was to examine the methodology of the covert action teams authorized by Prime Minister Golda Meir to find and assassinate those individuals responsible for the attack on the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in September 1972. Specifically, the study addresses whether the operational and tactical methods utilized in this counterterrorist effort were successful relative to the original operational objectives.

In 1972, the Israeli Mossad initiated one of the most ambitious covert counterterrorist campaigns in history. Golda Meir and the Israeli cabinet's top secret 'Committee-X' devised a campaign in retaliation for the massacre of eleven Israeli's during the Munich Olympic Games, broadly referred to as Operation Wrath of God or Mitzvah Elohim. Black September's (BSO) assault on the Olympic Village apartments on September 5, 1972, set in motion a chain of events unparalleled in the history of terrorism and antiterrorism tactics.

The report contains an extensive overview of the Munich Massacre. The study contains two case studies. The first case examines the details of the attempted assassination of Ali Hassan Salameh in Lillehammer on July 21, 1973. This operation resulted in the death of a Moroccan man misidentified as Ali Hassan Salameh and the exposure of seven Israeli officers in a highly publicized media event. On January 22, 1979, the Mossad found and killed Ali Hassan Salameh in Beirut using a remote-controlled car bomb.

The second case examines an independent team organized by senior Mossad operations officer Mike Harari, referred to as Avner's team. The pseudonym "Avner" represents the unit team leader selected by Harari. Mossad Chief Zwi Zamir provided the group with the identities of eleven top targets for assassination. Avner's unit consisted of five highly trained individuals with varied specialties. Each officer had some second and third language proficiencies. The different specialties included: devising alias documents, stealing vehicles, improvised explosive devices (IED), small arms, electronics, business, banking, and operational security. The premise of the unit was total flexibility. Although each officer had specialized skills, each team member could essentially perform any task. To sever any official ties with the Israeli Government, Avner's team resigned from their positions in the Mossad. With no formal contractual agreements, the resignations effectively terminated any further paper trails. The unit's goal was to operate until the successful completion of the mission or until death or injuries rendered it inoperable.

The report includes names and backgrounds of the targets on Mossad's hit list. A chart shows the 11 targets, whether they were hard or soft targets, the team assigned to assassinate, the date, location, and method for the hit, whether the hit was successful, if any members of the team was arrested, and collateral damage during the operation.DEPARTMENT OF STATE DOCUMENTS

324 pages of Department of State documents, dating from 1969 to 1972, covering the Munich Olympic Massacre, the actions of the United States after the massacre, material dealing with hijackings performed by Palestinians in the years prior to Munich, with Black September Organization connections.

Highlights among the documents include: Memo from NSC Staff member Hoskinson to Henry Kissinger reporting on the Israeli hostage situation in Munich and commenting that the Department of State was at a loss over how to apply pressure on the terrorists. A National Security Council memo shows that President Nixon discouraged Israeli retaliation. A memo from Secretary of State Rogers, informing President Nixon of the anti-terrorism initiatives he planned to take after the Munich Olympics Massacre. A telegram details a September 8, 1972, conversation with Israeli Ambassador Rabin on how to respond to the Munich incident.

Memos give responses to the 1969 Israeli attack on Khaldeh Airport in Beirut Lebanon. Memos show Israel holding fast to its policies on dealing with terrorism, during hijacking incidents of the late 1960's and early 1970's.

Memos chronicle the international reaction to the Dawson's Field hijacking of September 6, 1970, when four different jet aircraft bound from Europe to New York City, El Al Flight 219, Pan American Flight 93, TWA Flight 741, and Swissair Flight 100, were hijacked by Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine members. Two of the four flights landed at a remote desert airstrip in Jordan called Dawson's Field. El Al security officers on El Al Flight 219 shot and killed one of the two hijackers and captured the other, Leila Khaled. The plane landed at Heathrow airport in London and Leila Khaled was taken into custody. Pan American Flight 93 was a Boeing 747 and was determined to be too large to land at Dawson. It was flown to Cairo, emptied of its passengers and blown-up. The next day a fifth plane, BOAC flight 775, was hijacked by unrelated sympathizers during its flight from Bahrain to Beirut, and brought to Dawson's Field. The passengers were taken off the planes and all three planes were blown-up. All the hostages were released in exchange for the release of Leila Khaled and three PFLP members jailed in Switzerland. The Jordanian government's outrage over the incidents triggered the "Black September" Palestinian conflict in Jordan.NIXON TAPES

3 Hours 36 Minutes of President Richard Nixon White House recordings. Each tape has a log of the conversations. Mention is made of the Munich Olympic Massacre during the course of these nine different conversations, taking place between September 6, 1972 and September 8, 1972. Participating in conversation with President Richard Nixon are Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State William P. Rogers, H.R. Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman.

Points of conversation include: Israeli response to the Olympic murders. Kissinger's views of the events. Effect on the U.S. presidential election. Yitzhak Rabin's attitude concerning the events. Whether the Olympic Games should be canceled. Possible U.S. actions. President Nixon's conversations with Yitzhak Rabin. Fear that Israel would enter Lebanon. Prime Minister Meir's previous agreement on Beirut. The effect of the incident on Kissinger's secret trips to the Vietnam War peace talks in Paris. Israeli request for the U.S. to support cancellation of the Munich Games. Possible loss of Jewish votes if a misstep is made. Mark Spitz. The athletes' funerals in Israel. The politics of the Munich incident.FBI Files

47 pages of FBI files concerning a discredited tip that the Black September Organization planned on blowing-up a U.S. plane to coincide with the closing of the Munich Olympics and a discredited alleged threat by BSO against President Nixon in November, 1972.

Targeted Killings: Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Counterterrorism Policy

In addition to the 536 pages of material above, included on the disc is a 46 page report published in 2005 by the Bank of Israel, "Targeted Killings: Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Counterterrorism Policy," which mentions the Munich Olympic retributions.

The disc contains a text transcript of all recognizable text embedded into the graphic image of each page of each document, creating a searchable finding aid. Text searches can be done across all files on the

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

"An Israeli reputed to be Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega's closest associate may have eluded capture on the night of the United States invasion because he was warned to flee nearly six hours before American troops swept into the capital, the deputy commander of Panama's new police force said today. The Noriega associate, Mike Harari, a former Israeli intelligence officer, was last seen at 7 p.m. on Dec. 19 leaving the home of General Noriega's wife, the commander, Eduardo Herrera Hassan, said. The invasion began shortly before 1 a.m. on Dec. 20. Mr. Harari, the commander said, was reportedly accompanied by two Israeli assistants who had come for him with a car. The location of Mr. Harari, who is said to have trained and equipped General Noriega's elite security forces, has been a mystery." David E. Pitt, The New York Times, Jan. 2, 1990

For days it looked as if former Mossad hit squad chief Michael Harari, known to Panamanians as the "second most important person" in their country, was going to be totally ignored in US press accounts of the Panama invasion. Only NBC reported on two successive evenings at the beginning of the invasion that Noriega's Israeli aide and confidant had made a rapid series of visits to Nicaragua, Cuba and Israel in the days preceding the US strike in an apparent attempt to prepare a Noriega escape route.

The Israeli press, which considered Noriega the second most important person in Panama after Harari, wasn't so reticent as it speculated about how Israel's master spy would manage the escape to Israel, and whether or not he would bring Noriega along.

Despite the early warning to Israelis in Panama, however, Noriega didn't escape. US special operations troops disabled hidden planes and boats that would have been used, but at a cost in American lives. In the words of the Washington Times of Jan. 4: "Of the 23 soldiers killed in combat, I I were special operations forces. Military experts considered this a high casualty count for special forces." In other words, a lot of young American servicemen died at the hands of Panamanian elite units who apparently knew they were coming, possibly because of the action of one or more informants in the US government.

Americans won't read much serious media speculation about who those informants might be. The numbers of people within the US government who can find reasons not to pursue any investigation that may lead to Israel literally have reached critical mass.

Truth no longer will out, unless it absolves Israel. That is why virtually nothing significant emerged from the congressional hearings on the Reagan administration's arms-for-hostages dealings with Iran. Because every line of investigation led directly to Israel, no single line was pursued for long. The result is a near-total information blackout. Extremists in the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir count on it, and conduct themselves with total disregard for American public opinion.

But for the bizarre circumstances of his escape, the mainstream US media might never have revealed any of Harari's key role in a Panama-based triangle that apparently helped put drugs from Colombia into the US, used the proceeds to buy arms (some captured from the PLO in Lebanon) from Israel or through Israeli brokers, and then sold the arms. They certainly went to US-backed contras and friendly Latin governments. They may also have gone to states like Cuba and Nicaragua, and to Marxist guerrillas like those in El Salvador and Peru.

There are reports that Harari slipped out of Panama on an Israeli plane just before US forces struck. Other reports say he was caught by US forces, and then released. Astonished Americans, from embassy personnel to GIs, who believe they witnessed parts of that drama leaked the story. Then the spin doctors went to work to explain that the Americans and Panamanians involved had confused Harari's driver, a young Panamanian sergeant, with his Israeli boss, the often photographed, 62-year-old, second-most powerful man in Panama.

In coming months there will be conflicting explanations for the leak that alerted Israel, and almost certainly Noriega's forces as well, to the invasion, and for the escape of his principal aide. Perhaps, a year from now, few Americans will even remember he was an Israeli.

A masterful example of such spin control is a detailed backgrounder in the Jan. 7 Washington Post on Harari's long association with Panama's rulers. The article, by David Halevy and Neil Livingstone, describes other such Harari exploits as his personal direction of Israeli assassination squads that killed 12 alleged Black September Palestinian terrorists (along with an innocent Moroccan waiter in Norway and some innocent bystanders in Beirut) after the 1972 murder of Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich.

What the authors didn't mention is that by blowing up Ali Hassan Salameh with a car bomb in Beirut in January, 1979, Harari's amphibious hit squad also eliminated the PLO liaison to the US Embassy there. Salameh was the Palestinian personally responsible for assuring that official Americans assigned to the embassy, in a part of West Beirut controlled by the PLO, didn't get killed. Just how effective he was demonstrated after the PLO withdrew from West Beirut in 1982. Iranian-directed Shi'i terrorists twice bombed the embassy, with massive loss of life. That's another story, however, and not the kind Halevy and Livingstone make it their business to tell.

There are a lot of other things about Harari, Israelis in Panama, and their disastrous effect on the Jewish community there that Americans won't be reading in their daily newspapers or hearing on the evening news much longer. Before Harari recedes into the shadows, however, here are a few facts that were reported just before and immediately after his unplanned moment in the international media spotlight.

The Israeli government keeps referring to Harari as "retired." In the words of an official Israeli spokesman, "He is absolutely not connected in any way to the government." However, even Halevy and Livingstone admit he came out of his 1979 retirement in 1980 to accept an assignment as Mossad's director for Central America. Officially he was assigned to the Israeli Embassy in Mexico City. He spent most of his time, however, in Panama, where he had known since 1973 both Panamanian strongman Omar Torrijos, who was killed in a 1981 plane crash, and his successor, Noriega. Harari knew Noriega particularly well because, during the period "the Pineapple" was working as Torrijos' intelligence chief, and moonlighting as a $200,000 a year informant for the CIA and for Cuba as well, he also had become an informant for Israel's Mossad.

Noriega's Ties to Israel

It was no surprise. Noriega had undergone military and intelligence training in Israel, jumped five times with Israeli paratroopers, and-like Uganda's deposed dictator Idi Amin-proudly wore his Israeli paratrooper wings on his uniform for many years afterward. Although critics say America "bought and paid for" Noriega, he was also an Israeli creation and a great admirer of the ruthless "Israeli way," as was Amin, the most brutal despot in 20th century African history.

It was Harari who reorganized, renamed and trained the Panamanian Defense Forces when Noriega succeeded Torrijos. Harari also instructed Noriega's personal bodyguard and his "Special Anti-Terror Unit." Harari obtained advanced technical equipment and weapons for them, and there is no doubt he taught them how to anticipate and neutralize many of the attempts to monitor Noriega's activities launched by American intelligence officers from their bases in the Canal Zone.

Panama's strongman reciprocated. On one of his visits to Israel arranged by Harari in the 1980s, Noriega bought a seaside villa in the Tel Aviv suburb of Herzliya. Back in Panama, he sent his children to the Jewish community's prestigious Alberto Einstein day school and to an Israeli kibbutz one summer. Noriega also employed other Israeli security experts in the Harari-organized PDF, which in effect became the Noriega administration.

As for Harari's ongoing connections with Israel, Panama's new police commander, Eduardo Herrara Hassan, explains: "I was the ambassador to Israel but he was my boss. Everything I did had to be authorized by Harari."

"Mr. 60 Percent"

In the spring of 1988, when Colonel Herrara first broke with Noriega and took refuge in Miami, he said of Michael Harari: "We call him 'Mr. 60 Percent' because he gets that much from any deal that he makes." Harari took kickbacks from Israeli businessmen seeking to invest in Panama, and split the proceeds with Noriega.

Just how profitable that was is indicated by a Panamanian Jewish leader quoted in the Washington Jewish Week of Dec. 28:

"The Israelis working here do not, by and large, reflect well either on Israel or the Panamanian Jewish community. They have practically gained control of the Central Avenue business district. They are engaged in contraband and money laundering. In general, they engage in very aggressive and often unfair business practices. They mainly keep apart from the Jewish community, and have little interest in Panama. They are here to make a lot of money and get out."

When they get out, they will leave serious problems for Panamanian Jews. The Panamanian Jewish community, estimated at between 4,000 and 7,000 people, is mainly Sephardic with Caribbean roots that go back for centuries to Dutch colonies on Aruba and Curacao. However, about 80 percent of Panama's present Jewish community arrived from Syria after World War 11 and began to prosper when Torrijos, Noriega's predecessor, deposed the country's old-line Christian families and encouraged the Jews to take their places not only in commerce, but in the professions and politics as well.

Several Jews served in cabinets during the Noriega period. One of them, Eric Arturo De Valle, was described as one of the -Kleenex presidents" whom Noriega used briefly and, when they had served his purposes, threw away.

After De Valle, with US backing, disavowed the general in 1987, rioting with strongly anti-Semitic overtones set the stage for the most recent crisis.

"We are seen as disloyal by many," complains Moises Mizrachi, a businessman who heads the Panamanian committee of the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League. "The new government says there will be no revenge, but they have already put in jail without trial a lot of their enemies. Some of these people did terrible things, but there ought to have been due process."

Explaining his fears, Mizrachi told the Washington Jewish Week:

"It is certainly true that the Jewish community did prosper under the dictatorships (from 1969 to the present). The Christian businesses were largely displaced by Jewish businesses." Perhaps the US had no stomach for the kind of revelations a top Mossad operator with 40-years of experience could make about some American leaders.

He noted that in the three-day Panama City looting spree touched off by the US invasion, most of the hundreds of stores wrecked along 20 blocks of Central Avenue were Jewish-owned.

"The US didn't do wrong by coming in here to restore democracy, but we paid too dearly for it," Mizrachi said. "In fact, the whole bill was paid by the Panamanian Jewish community ... There was bad planning on the part of the US. If they had used a few of their tanks in the center of Panama City to protect the stores, much of the damage could have been prevented."

Mizrachi has called upon the US to pay compensation to Panamanian Jewish businessmen for losses of up to $1 billion during the three days of looting. He admitted, however, that until 1987, when the Reagan administration denounced Noriega for drug dealing and asked Israel to break off its close ties with the dictator, "We were definitely pro-government."

"We thought the government was a 50-50 proposition, that it had some support," he explains. "We were wrong."

Describing feeling within the Jewish community in the wake of Noriega's capture, Mizrachi said: "Most feel it is a blessing that a long nightmare is over. Under Noriega, there was no liberty. The man was clearly evil, and implacable with his enemies. But a few said he was good for the Jews."

Noting that Panamanian Jews were shocked at reports that US troops found pictures of Hitler and Libya's Qaddafi in Noriega's quarters, Mizrachi concluded:

"It was a big surprise to us, because he was always so friendly to Israel. If Harari had known about this, I'm sure he would have had nothing to do with [Noriega]."

In the US, national chairman Abraham Foxman of the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League declined to support Mizrachi's appeal for compensation to Panamanian merchants, but he added that, "There's chaos down there and the Jews stand out."

Rabbi Morton Rosenthal, ADL director for Latin American affairs, commented: "In the central shopping district, about 80 to 90 percent of the stores are owned by Jews, so the Jewish community has taken a very heavy hit financially."

An Uncharacteristic Sophistication

When a senior US Embassy official in Panama City first said that the US had seized Harari on Dec. 27, new Panamanian government spokesman Louis A. Martinez announced: "Everyone is really delighted here. It's big news. Second to Noriega, he was the most important person in Panama. He had tremendous influence on Noriega."

Vague allegations that Noriega was involved in the drug trade date to the early 1970s, well before Harari set up shop in Panama City in 1980. They became specific in 1981, however. Then in August 1986, Noriega's dealings with the Reagan administration developed an uncharacteristic sophistication. He offered to assassinate Nicaragua's Sandinista leaders "in exchange for a promise to clean up Noriega's image and a commitment to lift the ban on military sales to the Panamanian defense forces," according to a statement introduced at the IranContra trial of former White House aide Oliver North.

North subsequently met in London with Noriega, who offered to sabotage Sandinista government facilities in Nicaragua. Although there is no evidence that the US accepted any of these offers, which presumably were devised by Harari, they help explain why until 1987 the Reagan administration ignored allegations both about Noriega's drug ties and the extensive arms trade which Harari had organized for him.

The US break with Noriega, and a 1987 request to Israel to cut its ties with the Panamanian strongman, apparently resulted from reports that Noriega was using information he gathered while working with the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to help drug smugglers avoid DEA detection of their aircraft.

The size of the arms trade conducted through Panama is suggested by Washington Post writer George Wilson's Jan. I report from David, a town near Panama's border with Costa Rica, where he accompanied US infantrymen confiscating weapons caches:

"All the officers and soldiers inter-viewed here expressed amazement at the quality and sophistication of the weapons, which they said include Soviet grenades and Chinese copies of the American M-16 assault rifle, and they wondered why Noriega stockpiled far more weapons than his military forces could use," Wilson wrote.

�... I'll give you my personal opinion,� said an officer involved in the arms-recovery effort in this region. �Noriega was an international weapons trafficker as well as an international drug trafficker. There is no other way to explain why he had so many weapons hidden in so many different places.�

As for the man who made Noriega into an international arms trafficker, after his escape from Panama he was back on Israeli television, whose last report before the invasion had described him as an "Israeli security agent" who was mapping out an escape route to Nicaragua for Noriega.

"They said I was Noriega's adviser," Harari complained in his Jan. 5 television interview in Israel. "I'm not an adviser. I wasn't in the past. I'm not number one and I'm not number two. Noriega is not a partner of mine ... I did not supervise affairs ... or train his forces. I did not organize his personal guard. I am simply a private individual involved in business."

Perhaps that's what he told the Americans who collared and then released him. Even though they didn't believe him, someone higher up pretended to. Perhaps the US had no stomach for the kind of revelations a top Mossad operator with 40 years of experience could make about some American leaders.

There's still one country on the globe, however, with the guts to bring this international merchant of death to justice. While Harari was reportedly in US custody, Norway's deputy state attorney indicated his country would ask the US to extradite Harari to Oslo for trial. The Norwegians, it seems, haven't forgotten a humble Moroccan immigrant whom Harari's team of casual killers mistook for Ali Hassan Salameh.

On July 21, 1973, Harari watched two of his six Mossad hit squad colleagues pump 14 bullets into the Moroccan waiter as he strolled with his pregnant Norwegian wife on a quiet street in Lillehammer. In Israel, and perhaps the United States as well, government officials may think that's macho. In God-fearing Norway, it's still called murder.

Richard H. Curtiss is editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

An interesting reading for the week-end from the group SomeUnknownUSHistory:Confessions of a US death squad member - Chip Tatum

Gene “Chip” Tatum joined the Air Force Special Force as a forward air controller, 70’s, at age 19. He went to US Army Special Forces school and was assigned to South-East Asia as Airman First Class (A1C) in December 1970, he was assigned as a radio operator on a Forward Air Control (FAC) aircraft attached to Task Force Alpha (secretly under operational controlled of the CIA, but on paper it looked like it was under the 56th Special Operations Wing, and under the major command, US Pacific Air Forces (PACAF), under the Joint Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense. 56th Special Operations Wing and Task Force Alpha were operating out of Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base Phanom, Thailand. As to how much of a secret this was I don’t know, but it appears the US did whatever we could to keep our operations there secret. I have noted more about 56th Special Operations Wing at the end of this article.

Shortly after being assigned to Thailand, Airman Chip Tatum, assigned to a task force code-named, Team Red Rock. The team was composed of Airman Tatum, eight US Army Green Berets, three US Navy SEALs and two CIA paramilitary officer or (aka direct action) or contract agents/soldiers (a total of 14 US men) that was under operational control directly from the White House. A plan had been drawn up and ordered by President Nixon, Henry Kissinger and General Alexander Haig. Team Red Rock was to enter Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, and secretly attack the Pochentong airport, military and civil installations, and destroy all of the Cambodian air force parked there, or as many as possible. The plan called for the team to parachute into the outskirts of Phnom Penh. They were tasked to take with them two formerly captured, North Vietnamese Army (NVA) POWs wearing their NVA uniforms, but were unarmed and alive.

The plan was to murder the POWs and their bodies left to be discovered by Cambodian forces. The purpose of this was to makes the Cambodian leaders come to the false conclusion that the North Vietnamese were responsible for the attack. This kind of operation is called a “False Flag” operation. This whole plan including the murders was approved and ordered by President Nixon, Henry Kissinger, General Alexander Haig. According to Tatum, he and the rest of his team were dressed in North Vietnamese uniforms as were the NVA POWs, This is a violation of the Geneva and Hague convention (a war crime) and the team could be shot as spies if were captured.

It was also part of the secret mission, and ordered by Pres.Nixon, Kissinger, and/or Haig, that Team Red Rock was not to come back from this mission alive.in Cambodia alive. A detachment of Montagnard tribesmen working for the CIA, was assigned to kill everyone of the team and dispose of the bodies to make sure no word about this mission ever leaked out. Chip Tatum is not very forth coming in his video interview with Ted Gunderson, a former FBI Chief of Station, for Los Angeles. It will help you in understanding what I am telling you here, if you watch the following video tape after reading this.

In video tape Tatum only stated that in 1971 he was many times on classified mission in Cambodia. Also he did not have a good understanding of why Nixon wanted this false flag mission done. In face, Tatum may have been lied to as to the real purpose of his mission and had never got around to doing a google search about the history of his mission. By looking at the open source history of the civil war in Cambodia, I was able to learn the date of Team Red Rocks attack and destruction of the pro-US Cambodian Air Forces’ airplanes. General Lon Nol was at this time the leader of Cambodia.

A little background of events in Cambodia at the time:

On March 18, 1970 - Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia is deposed by General Lon Nol in a bloodless coup. The Cambodian National Assembly passed a unanimous vote of nonconfidence in Sihanouk and replaced him as chief of state. However, General Lon Nol had his military forces Royal Khmer Armed Forces or in French, the Forces Armées Royales Khmeres (FARK), take over the airport and radio station and standing by to fight to over-throw Sihanouk. Sihanouk was in France for medical treatment at the time. After the coup, he aligns with Cambodian Communists, known as the Khmer Rouge, in an effort to oust Lon Nol’s regime. The Lon Nol government pardoned some 500 political prisoners, the majority of whom were Khmer Serei.

The Royal Khmer Armed Forces “Forces Armées Royales Khmeres” (FARK), was established on 9 November 1953 under a Franco-Khmer convention. This contributed to the termination of the French colony and protectorate, and Cambodia obtained its own authentic military organization. The French Army advisors and trainers remained in Cambodia until 1971.

Now I learned that on the night of 21 January 1971, open source history noted that “North Vietnamese attacked Pochentong” airfield, Phnom Penh Cambodia, ….”fought and killed the security guards of the Cambodian Army (FARK) before saturating most of the installations on the airfield with heavy fire from automatic weapons and multiple rocket launchers. A group of Vietnamese climbed even to the roof of the commercial terminal at Pochentong and started firing at the ammunition depot – full of napalm bombs. Before anybody could react the Vietnamese disappeared back into the jungle.”

“When the smoke cleared on the following morning, the Cambodians could count their casualties: 39 officers and other ranks were killed and 170 injured. Fortunately no FARK pilots were killed: the pilot’s quarters were not hit by the North Vietnamese mainly targeted the aircraft on apron. However, most of the FARK aircraft were destroyed, including all MiG-17s and UH-1Hs, as well as three O-1s of the SVAF. The Pochentong airfield remained closed for almost a week: the tarmac, ammunition depots and the runway had all had to be repaired and new equipment brought in from the USA.

Only days earlier the Congress in Washington decided to supply equipment worth $175 million, but now the Americans were forced to further increase their deliveries in order to completely rebuilt the FARK air force.. Especially the White House felt compelled to do something: it could not send any troops officially to Cambodia, but it could organize a Military Equipment Delivery Team – Cambodia (MEDTC), which was officially to control the flow of supplies to Pnom Penh, but actually to become deeply involved in training of the Cambodian military.”

Photographs of the destroyed aircraft and the Pochentong airfield in can be seen at the:

Now I think the Red Rock Team real mission was to convince Congress to authorized more money to finance new and improved aircraft in support of the pro-US and anti-commie, Lon Nol’s regime. is really why President Nixon order this false flag mission. Here is Tatum account of what happened. “So Team Red Rock goes in and just blow up the airport. We jumped in with North Vietnamese sappers, and we left their bodies there in North Vietnamese uniforms. We utilized particular airburst rounds with the aviation side, so that there wasn’t a lot of damage, you know, to the tarmac itself. We had slap-pack explosives that blew up the planes. We made sure that the planes were parked close enough so that one explosion could take out three or four units, so it looked like the damage was terrible.

We had aircraft carriers sitting off the coast, waiting to replace the aircraft that were blown up on the ground. So you (the US) moved in the next day to save him (Gen. Lon Nol) from The North Vietnamese that just attacked his country. … The “Time” magazine and “Newsweek” magazine articles both said (that) Washington touted it as one of the greatest offensives the North Vietnamese have ever masterminded, a mastermind offensive.”

President Nixon had ordered an invasion of Cambodia in May of 1970 against North Vietnamese safe havens and supply depots. Lon Nol in the meantime, had called up military reserves, had requested UN intervention, and, while reiterating Cambodia’s position of neutrality, had issued a call for international assistance. Chip Tatum’s account of history reasons for the false flag attack on January 21, 1971, is as follows : “ Lon Nol, the premier of Cambodia, was a fence-sitter. He was - you know, China was right next door, and China was the catalyst for all this. He was rocking between China and the United States, If the North Vietnamese came into his country, he’d put a Nixon decided that what we needed to do - and this was part of( Assistant Secretary of State’s assistant) Haig’s plan …battalion over there, just to show force, but no real battle-plans, no real alliance anywhere.It was hoped that such an act would stiffen Lon Nol’s backbone. A furious Lon Nol would assume North Vietnam was to blame. With nowhere else to turn, (as a) US puppet (he) would urgently seek US hardware to strengthen his forces and continue the battle.”

Here is some more historic background on Cambodia:

Under Sihanouk Cambodia had filed a complaint in the UN Security Council against the United States and South Vietnam for their “repeated acts of aggression against Cambodia.” Relations were formally terminated May 3, 1965. In 1966 Sihanouk secretly granted access to a Cambodian the deep-water port to the North Vietnamese. This port became a main entry point for North Vietnamese military supplies from China and from the Soviet Union. Armaments were then transported to North Vietnamese and Viet Cong sanctuaries on the border with South Vietnam, over a highway.. This effective supply route enabled the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong to stockpile substantial amounts of armaments and equipment for the 1968 Tet Offensive against the Saigon government.

Tatam continues to describe the secret Red Rock mission. His Special Forces team leaders got suspicious of the Montagnard set up to help them get back to our home in Nakhon Phanom, Thailand where he was based out of. The Montagnards they met had in fact been ordered by the CIA to kill the whole Team Red Rock. The team managed to kill the Montagnards, but several team members had been killed at this point. Using their knowledge of “escape and evasion” tactics, the team decided to trek to the South Vietnamese border and back to safety with US forces. Only eight of them remained. Soon the whole team was captured by North Vietnamese Army.

Tatum says, “We didn’t know that they had orders to kill us? We were ultimately captured (by the North Vietnamese). We were tortured. Many of us were killed. I was severely beaten, severely tortured… We were liberated by a routine patrol of U.S. Marines. (They) got in a fire-fight with North Vietnamese (guards) and (they) didn’t know we were in the encampment, (Team Red Rock was wearing their NVA uniforms) - and three of us were running out of the camp. One of them received a gut-shot and died (from friendly fire). The other two of us received severe head-wounds, and we were both in comas with brain-trauma (and evacuated to an American hospital in the Philippines). I have discussed below in this article, Airman Tatum’s the 92-day captivity as a prisoner of war and the torture of him and the other members of the team.

Tatum claims that while he was in the Philippines, he was visited by William Colby, who was the CIA station chief in Vietnam and was told by him that Pres. Nixon had order the death of all of Team Red Rock. At this time Colby recruited Airman Tatum into the CIA. Tatum said he was later tasked to work as part of the CIA’s operation Phoenix in Vietnam. He utilized a lot of military personnel, who were special-ops guys. Men who were special forces and primarily officers. He says a lot of the information the Phoenix people got was bogus, and assassinations were performed on that bogus information, so a lot of innocent civilians were killed.

In 1974 Tatum was attached to Air America as a communications specialist near the end of Vietnam, He jumped in a lot of zones, trying to move downed aircraft, downed Air America pilots, downed military pilots who were where we weren’t, into safe zones to have them picked up. Air America started losing a lot of aircraft for some unknown reason. Tatum hinted that he suspects that the CIA was killing off its own Air American pilots in airplane crashes, just as they had tried to kill off his Red Rock Team. It should be noted here that Air American pilots were flying opium out of Laos to pay for their covert war there. It is possible some of the Air American pilots had ethical views about being part of such a CIA program.

Tatum says a CIA person was in charge of a program during the Vietnam War to go in behind the enemy lines and assassinate the civilian North Vietnamese and Chinese leaders, who were running things and to get rid of the commanders, and the communication. Tatum states that his next assignment with the CIA was that he was sent to the US’s Aviano Air Base in Italy, and working out of there, he would infiltrate Yugoslavia and the Communist Bloc countries, like Bulgaria.

We had received information early that there was a possibility of POW’s/MIA’s who were moved through Burma into this - into - sent to Communist Bloc countries to be held there, so we started looking, and I would report - every Monday, I would have to go back to Aviano Air Base, to the command-and-control center, where we had a secure line, and call in to Washington Switch, and speak with the director, and report our findings. Tatum found two US POW’s/MIA’s from Vietnam war that had been sent from Vietnam over into the Soviet Bloc countries, is that what you’re saying?

One was named Hill or Hull. Tatum thinks was a pilot, a captain or a lieutenant. Tatum actually found them in Bulgaria. Tatum sent a letter about this to Red McDaniel, head of the American Defense Institute from jail. McDaniel says the POW’s/MIA is a cover-up. Within six weeks after Tatum found those two American POWs, he was shipped back to the U.S. and to Colorado. This was when Bush Sr. was the director of the CIA.

Pegasus was an organization within the CIA that spied on the spies working for the CIA and tests them to see if they were honest and not easily recruited or go public about illegal CIA drug operations, for example, drug trafficking. It has been establish right after World War II, a group within the CIA. This was a CIA operation under the direct operational control of the National Security Council. In other words, this was an illegal government Department within our government. Congress has to approval and has oversight over the Departments under the President because Congress funds all of our government. The president wanted someone that he could trust, so he formed his own small group of operatives which he called “Pegasus.” These were the people who worked and communicated their information directly to the president of the United States. Pegasus remained a part of the CIA until just after the Kennedy assassination, Tatum alleges. After that, it became a shadow CIA with other nations like Israel, UK and other foreign government foreign intelligence services as part of it, during the Johnson and Nixon administrations.

The chain of command under the President for operation Pegasus was the National Security Council (NSC), the Special Situation Group and the Terrorist Incident Working Group and then the Operational Sub-Groups (OSG). These three sub-groups were the case officers or special operations military soldiers of Pegasus and not answerable to Congress. One OSG handled moving arms secretly and the anti-drug task force, the OSG /counter terror group was made up of Delta Force, and Special Operations group, Navy Seals), and one OSG handled neutralizations – to include assassinations. Each OSG unit had a commander in charge.

Tatum claims that is Maggie Thatcher would have said, “I want this done, and I want it done now, and even though she’s not an active politician, you can bet your bottom dollar it would be done.” “Pegasus” is a code-name given by CIA station Chief William Colby in 1971 member of the ultra-secret international G-7-run Pegasus hit-team National Security Council, NSA , you’re talking about blackmail. Tatum said, “Depending on the mission and the goals of the mission, you may have a whole team assigned to you, you may have one person, you may have people coming in and out of your life, you know, not necessarily full-time, just, you know, here, let’s spend a week with this guy and go after him. There are so many out there that we have to align.”

Tatum says that he thinks Initially Pegasus was formed as a group to keep an eye on the intelligence community. Then it evolved into gathering information on politicians on certain committees, so that, if the needs be, there was enough information there to approach those people on behalf of the president, and twist their arms. During 1980 Tatum was reactivated in the CIA, but this time into the US Army. He was sent to the US Army Flight School for rotary- wing training at Fort Rucker. From there he was assigned to the 160th Aviation Battalion/Special Forces at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Because of his training in the Air Force as a forward air traffic controller and the weakness of radars, what thet can and can not see. He knew how to fly into and out of the US and other countries without being detected. He had trained about the EC3A advanced airborne command post and AWACS program, so that he understood what the radars were looking at and what the FAA and US air defense controllers could and could not see.

As a pilot, Tatum knew what those areas are, and he would be able to maneuver your way up into the various states, and drop major drops without being detected. One could buy a little Cobra radar-detector and put it in your aircraft, and you’ll know whether you’re being tracked by radar or not. You mask yourself behind some hills or something, and you drop out of that 5,000-foot range, get down into below 500 or below, and no one will catch you.

Mexico is one of the large transshipment points, as is now coming across the northern border of the United States. Tatum was able to fly even single-engine aircraft and take off, specially equipped single-engine aircraft, take off in Colombia, fly to the Bahamas, rest overnight, wait for a weather-window, go up into Nova Scotia, come across to the Wayburn (sp?) area of Saskatchewan, and then come down into Montana, North Dakota. This was one of his major routes to fly drugs into the US. Tatum alleges that some people that were on Customs staff that Tatum investigated were running certain (radar) sites around the Caribbean, and were shutting their radars down and letting aircraft come through.

I have a source who was told that Coast Guard in North Carolina would routinely not operating their surveillance aircraft on curtain days, allegedly because they didn’t have enough money aircraft fuel. In 1981, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 3 that places the intelligence community, and all intelligence assets under the Vice President Bush. During 1983, former CIA director William Colby established contact again, advising Tatum he would shortly be contacted by “a man called North”, Lt Col. Oliver North. Tatum says that North’s “Enterprise” not only set up the cocaine factories and “ran” the Colombian cartels, but was also responsible for masterminding the massive shipments of narcotics into the US. Significantly, he is not alone in making these accusations. A number of those involved in Col. North’s operations have subsequently come forward and spilled the beans. Almost all of these “whistleblowers” have been hounded and imprisoned. Some have died, whilst others have fled. The whole Contra thing, Tatum states, was also being used by an extremely covert group called Pegasus.

In addition to taking his orders from Oliver North and Felix Rodríguez, Tatum was tasked to work directly for Amiram Nir, a former Mossad agent and advisor to Vice President Bush. Aviation support for Pegasus missions operated out of Ilopango Air Base, Honduras (home of the CIA proprietary airline Corporate Air Services) plus numerous Contra camps located in the jungles and mountains along the Honduras-Nicaragua border. Posing as a US Army medavac helicopter Tatum routinely flew/ transported of large white coolers noted as medical supplies in and out of the Contra camps, but they really contained cocaine. From 1983-84 when Tatum was stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, he regularly he would fly these white coolers, marked as “Medical Supplies”, to Little Rock Air Force Base, Arkansas. On two occasions he carried similar coolers to Mena Airport, Arkansas. Deliveries of medical coolers to Little Rock AFB were picked up by Dr Dan Lasater - a close confidant of the then Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton.

On the one hand Tatum was flying classified active-duty missions for the US Army; on the other, he was flying CIA missions arranged throughMil. Group A (CIA), located at the embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras; and thirdly, he was flying Pegasus missions under the control of William Colby, Oliver North and George Bush following his recruitment into Pegasus by Colby in 1986. Tatum claims the US flew over four tons of cocaine out of Honduras in the middle 1980s. He states that Major Rodriguez, who was Felix Rodriguez, was one of his bosses or handlers in Honduras . In 1985, Tatum was assigned (sheep-dipped ) into a unit at Fort Steward, GA, as an undercover Army officer flying a medical evacuation helicopter. One of the medics assigned to his helicopter was a Specialist Macdonald(sp?). There was a company called Corporate Air Services flying into Honduras was well.

Tatum also says he could call to “Washington Switch” from Pomeroy (sp?) Air Base, and he talked directly with another of his handlers, Oliver North. Tatum’s missions were to fly into Contra camps and he learned that the Contras were indeed manufacturing the cocaine themselves, under the direction of a Colombia Ramon. Ramon was later assassinated just prior to the Noriega trial. He says that if someone was felt to be a problem, he would be “Arkancided” (meaning made it look like a suicide as had occurred in the death associated drug trafficking operation run out of Mena, AR) , otherwise known as “suicided “ or they die in a plane crash.

Tatum said, Ollie North set these five camps up with cocaine kitchens producing 500 kilos per week. The 159th Aviation Battalion out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, super-chinooks (sp?) were flying in the fuel-pods and equipment, dropping them in, dropping bladders of acetone to manufacture the coca leaves into cocaine Tatum says drugs went to either Ilapongo(sp?) Air Base in El Salvador, or they went up to Panama. Also El Ocatal (sp?) to a meeting of this cartel.

Several of the people that Tatum flew to this meeting in El Ocatal were General Noriega, Mike Harari, who was a retired Mossad agent and was a member of a rich Jewish Panama family, Felix Rodriguez, Joe Fernandez, who was the CIA station-chief in Costa Rica, Gen. Gustavo Alvarez (sp?), who was the U.S. - or the Honduran Army chief of staff, and a guy named William Barr, who represented the assets of this enterprise. Barr became the Attorney General under President George Bush Sr., and replacing AG Thornburgh.

Tatum claims he had dinner with Vice Pres. Bush Sr’s national security director, Don Gregg and Gregg discussed drugs with Tatum. He said, Gregg gave him large briefcase of money to be taken to a meeting that was going to be held in El Acatal (sp?), Costa Rica. At this meeting there was in attendance, William Barr, Gen. Noriega, Amiram Nir, Mike Harari – both of them Mossad – Joe Fernandez, Felix Rodriguez, and Gen. Alvarez (sp?), from the chief of staff of the Honduran army. On April 12, 1985, VP George Bush was in Honduras and he met with the president of Colombia and the president of Honduras. This was at the heights of everything going on in the Iran-Contra situation, Tatum would soon get to meet CIA pilot and DEA confidential informant, Barry Seal and they become close friends. Seal openly boasted he had information that implicated high-level government officials, including then-Vice President Bush. Seal gave Tatum a list of the following named people in the Enterprise’s narcotics-trafficking business.

1. William Casey, former Director Central Intelligence2. Clair Elroy George, Head of CIA’s Central American Task Force3. Vice President George Bush4. Henry Kissinger, Chairman, Kissinger Associates; former US Secretary of State; former National Security Adviser5. General Alexander Haig, former Secretary of State6. Donald Gregg, former National Security Adviser to VP Bush, Ambassador to Korea and alleged joint “Controller”/CIA case officer of Panama’s Manuel Noriega, along with William Casey7. Duane “Dewey” Clarradge, CIA officer8. Joseph Fernandez, CIA Costa Rica Station Chief9. Lt Col. Oliver North, National Security Council aide10. John Singlaub, CIA covert operator11. William Colby, Director Central Intelligence, 1973-76)12. Richard V. Secord, (former General CIA black operative)13. William Weld, head of Criminal Division, US Department of Justice; ( instrumental in “blocking” Senate investigations into narcotics, according to testimony of former Senate special investigator, Jack Blum)14. Felix Rodríguez, CIA officer with close connection to VP Bush15. LTG Leonard H. Perroots, USAF, Defense Intelligence Agency, 1985 – 1988. After retiring in 1992, Perroots was the president of a private military company called Group VectorOf those listed above, the following named people were also officers of the Nugan Hand Bank that has been linked to CIA drug trafficking in South Vietnam and laundering of the drug profits.

1. Major General John Singlaub ran covert operations throughout Asia. In December 1966 he was assigned to activate the 56th Air Commando Wing at Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand. This is the unit Tatum was assigned to during as part of Operation Red Rock. Singlaub also was the founder in 1981 of the United States Council for World Freedom, the U.S. chapter of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL).

2. Major General Richard Secord

3. William Colby

During l986, Tatum had left Honduras and set up a money-laundering business in Watertown, NY, close to the home base of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum. The location was chosen because of access to Fort Drum’s telephone lines for secure communications. Tatum was assigned a Cherokee-140 fixed-wing aircraft, used to ship personnel and supplies across the Canadian border under radar cover. His tenure with these companies lasted from 1986 through to 1990. This was a pure Pegasus operation. It was at Watertown that Tatum was provided with a civilian cover in the form of three construction companies: American National Home Builders, American Constructors and American Homes. Funding was provided by Henry Hyde, an Illinois Republican politician and well known as the CIA’s “black money” man. The dirty money was filtered via construction loans with permanent “takeouts” “arranged by banks and mortgage- lenders”. These, in turn, were later sold to Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s - negotiable US Federal Mortgage Securities that are traded globally on a daily basis. Each laundry “cycle” lasted from six months to a year. The result was dirty money transformed into good, clean, US currency.

Hyde provided a US$250,000 line of credit with Key Bank, Watertown. Although Tatum was listed as the president in all three companies, in reality all were under the control of Ben Whittaker, a lawyer from Rochester, New York. Whittaker, Tatum says, is closely associated withTony Wilson of the Wilson family who owned Xerox Corporation. They are extremely wealthy and “friends of the Rothschilds and Rockefellers”. In addition, he was also closely associated with South Eastern US Investment Group (SEUS) - an investment bank in Savannah, Georgia - from 1985 through to 1989. Another proprietary he was involved with was Irving Place Development, a service organization of Irving Bank and Trust Company. Cocaine proceeds were laundered through these companies by an ingenious use of construction loans.

The drug-related money was placed in Arkansas, Colorado and Ohio. Tatum thinks that this was either that that banking laws were the reason or that Bush had people in his pocket in these areas. He does explain that the primary figure involved in the laundry exercise in Arkansas wasJack Stephens. Jackson Stephens, owner of Worthen Bank & Trust Company, is closely aligned with Bill Clinton. Tatum states that “...Clinton received the cash and divided it up between Stephens and [Dan] Lasater to clean it up. Stephens’ company [Worthen Bank] was used as the guarantor, providing ‘warehouse’ lines of credit.”

One initial “test-bed” was a small residential mortgage lender named Carl I. Brown of Commercial Investment Brokers (CIB) a commercial Real Estate brokerage in Kansas. Others were larger, and still others became national. All were ultimately destined to be purchased by a bank (proprietary) from Japan within a specific time-frame, 1996, as part of ongoing Pegasus plans. Eric Brown, the son of the founder of CIB, was heavily involved in these activities. Three additional companies were involved, to Tatum’s knowledge: US Homes, Pulte Homes and Richmond Homes. All became very successful.

Tatum says he joined Task Force 160 in 1986 at Fort Campbell. It was a Pegasus unit formed after the failed Iran Hostage recue mission, nick- named the “Night Stockers” because they usually flew at night using night vision goggles - most likely after Reagan became President. Tatum was assigned to fly a helicopter for this secret CIA air lift support unit. Tatum joined the and his groups was an international mission and had Turkish intelligence, Danish intelligence, British intelligence (MI-6), and Israeli Mossad intelligence working in with them.

Tatum’s group had about 80 officers in it made up of Danish intelligence, Israeli intelligence, and British intelligence and people from the FBI, Department of Defense, Defense Intelligence Agency, and NSA. It didn’t have any DEA agents, but on several occasions Tatum says Pegasus supported DEA and ATF operations. Each officer was a case officer, who sets up their own intelligence network. Meaning they had the cash to hire contract agents.

Tatum says that usually these groups had about 50 or 60 people. All officers in a group reported back to three different leaders, back over at CIA Headquarters or in the Executive Office Building Over the years he had worked with several FBI intelligence officers, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Institute of Health, and Department of Energy personnel. Mossad has about 25 active Kochsas (sp?) (CIA type officers). Tatum supervised his own people working for him, an independent network. All the 80 operatives activities are compartmentalize, so one doesn’t know who the other is. If Tatum needed specialists, if he need an archer team – (aka a assassination team) they would be assigned ( most likely by the OSG unit commander). Tatum alleges that he probably only flew as the pilot, out of 18 archer missions, only flew the same individuals maybe three times. A mission would come down, and then Tatum would decide what type of aircraft he would use for the mission.

It was at Watertown that Tatum was provided with a civilian cover in the form of three construction companies: American National Home Builders, American Constructors and American Homes. Funding was provided by Henry Hyde, an Illinois Republican politician and well known as the CIA’s “black money” man. Hyde provided a US$250,000 line of credit with Key Bank, Watertown. Although Tatum was listed as the president in all three companies, in reality all were under the control of Ben Whittaker, a lawyer from Rochester, New York.

Whittaker, Tatum says, is closely associated with Tony Wilson of the Wilson family who owned Xerox Corporation. They are extremely wealthy and “friends of the Rothschilds and Rockefellers”. In addition, he was also closely associated with South Eastern US Investment Group (SEUS) - an investment bank in Savannah, Georgia - from 1985 through to 1989. Another proprietary he was involved with was Irving Place Development, a service organization of Irving Bank and Trust Company. Cocaine proceeds were laundered through these companies by an ingenious use of construction loans.

Tatum stated in some case he had the opportunity also to utilize civilian assets. He took part in setting up civilian proprietary companies and utilize those companies. He knew of one company that he had up in upstate New York, in Watertown, New York, during the construction of Fort Drum, the 10th Mountain Division. Pegasus was there to oversee, to investigate, and to look into these companies, look at the engineers, see if they were doing anything, see if they were bugging the buildings in which war planning and highly classified information would be discussed. He was supplied with a $250,000 signature line of credit. I could walk into Key Bank, and, on any given day, take out $250,000 cash. Tatum says he had learned third-hand hearsay, that the lines of credit were set up by Henry Hyde, the congressman from Illinois. He set up the accounts for Tatum through an attorney out of upstate New York by the name of Whittaker (sp?).

As a member of OSG, Tatum didn’t report any longer to his originating agency. In other words, if he was on an OSG mission, he wouldn’t report directly to the CIA any longer. He would report only to my OSG commander. Colin Powell had personally signed off on all the military planes that we flown by Task force 160, because one week you’re flying for the CIA on civilian status, and the next week you’re in the military. Mr. Powell had that position for a while...not the full time. Tatum hinted that if he need to a military installation and requisition a Defender airplane with 16 missiles on it was the reason he had to have Powell signature military orders. Tatum’s undercover orders were signed by a two- or three-star general holding the position of the deputy commander, or deputy person of intelligence attached to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deputy director.

An archer team had four five men. At least two of them were assassins or snipers, and one was usually a recon man who would—whose set-up was communications equipment, reconnaissance equipment, and so forth, to find the target, and then my side was to get them in and get them out. One of the preferred method in a neutralization, was/is to use the mind-altering drugs to control our targets. It’s odorless and tasteless. “borodanga” (sp?), and you can tell them to go to the bank and withdraw all their funds from the bank, and they’ll go do it. They’ll return it to you, and the following day, when they go to the bank, or two days later, when they go to the bank, to get their money out, they won’t remember that they withdrew it all and gave it to you. Complete amnesia is one of the effects of it. You could actually tell somebody, “Go shoot somebody,” and they’d do it.

The man in Israel that shot Yitzhak Rabin is, the man in Israel admitted to it initially, and then comes back and said he doesn’t recall any of those instances. That’s escopolaminia. Once they had a person on a derivative of scopolamine, escopolaminia (sp?), they didn’t need anything else. They could control them for up to three weeks, and, during that three weeks, they could actually alter their personality, so there was no real requirement for shock-unless, for some reason, there were some discipline problems, or the body-size required too much of the drug to take effect. But that was rarely the case. You know, we lost a few people, from overdoses, but that’s about it.

Tatum got advanced training in using these drugs new drugs would come out. He would be trained on the product, maximum utilization of the product, dosage and so forth. Tatum’s archer-teams were five-man teams, he was the fifth man. The pay was $50,000 per mission to complete the mission. Some people were paid $25,000 a mission. That’s members of OSG-2 who are intelligence-officers or civilians. Tatum was given $25,000 for each assignment. His job was to get the teams there. The number of teams Pagasus had in various places around the world were enormous. Some teams only got a couple of missions. Tatum claims he has heard, that there as many as 3,000 professionally-trained assassins around the world.

Sometimes he delivered computer-technicians into other countries to collect data, to move financial accounts around, so that certain leaders wouldn’t have access to their money, and neutralization teams told them, “If you want your money, do what we say.” The OSG-1, was the anti-drug task force, which was run by Vice Pres. Bush, and he was assigned as the leader of the South Florida anti-drug task force.Tatum says was aware of 15 countries that were put under US control (or incumbent governments overthrown), and all theses 15 countries were involved in international trafficking of drugs in one phase or another and arms sales, in which our US leaders profited and that was the main reason for doing “aligning” these countries. Tatum says he refused to neutralize an American citizen, on many occasions, but he says it has been done for 25 to 50 thousand dollars.

Tatum claims CIA director Bill Colby once told him how Gen. Omar Torrijos was killed after someone put a large cooler on board Torrijos’ aircraft marked “Medical Supplies.” It blew up on the aircraft and killed everyone on board on July 31, 1981. His death deprived Central America of a potential moderating influence. Although he was considered a leftist dictator, he simultaneously had the support of the US as he opposed communism. His politics were based instead on progressivism.

John Perkins alleges in his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, that Torrijos was assassinated by American interests, who had a bomb planted aboard his aircraft. The alleged motive is that some American business leaders and politicians strongly opposed the negotiations between Torrijos and a group of Japanese businessmen who were promoting the idea of a new, larger, sea-level canal. Just three months after Ecuadorian president Jaime Roldós died in strikingly similar circumstances. Tatum said that when Pegasus kills someone they use “compound poisons and so forth that imitate heart attacks and don’t show up… Neutralizations and assassinations aren’t blatant, but sometimes they are. Pegasus will use a South African to kill a leader in Sweden. OSG-1 was the arms-trading arm. The arms-business is what is what caused the death of the prime minister of Sweden.”

There was a connection between George Bush, North, Don Gregg and Olof Palme. Olof Palme was a prime minister of Sweden. One of the things that needed to be done was to get, for all the weapons that were being purchased for the Contras and built-in without serial numbers End-user certificates for all these weapons needed to be obtained, so that it could be stated the weapons came from a different country than the United States, for example Sweden, because the Boland Amendment didn’t allow the Reagan administration to provide weaponry into Honduras and El Salvador. Olof Palme chose not to participate and he was dead within weeks, assassinated in 1986.

Tatum claims that in 1989, Vice President Bush gave the order to President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, so he agreed to have elections. Members of an alignment subgroup went in, told Ortega what date they would assassinate his second cousin, who was a very good friend of his (intimidated and coerced). They told him to put as many armies around that man that he wanted, but that man was going to die. That man died on that date. Two weeks later, President Ortega announced that there would be free elections. Tatum is aware of 18 of these types of missions involving national leaders of other countries but did not say whether people were murdered or how.

Enrique Bermúdez founded the largest Contra army in the war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, from 1979 until the end of the military conflict in 1990. Bermudez was the Contras’ top military commander. In addition to being responsible for all of the Contras’ military operations. A 1988 General Accounting Office document showed that Bermudez earned at least $2,750 monthly in CIA salary. When he joined the Contras’ political arm in August 1988, Bermudez received $180,000 a month in CIA “political funds.”

Evidence gathered during congressional hearings in the mid-1980s suggests that Bermudez himself had previously had a hand in the drug trade. “Bermudez was the target of a government-sponsored drug sting operation,” said Senator John Kerry, who chaired a committee that investigated charges of Contra cocaine smuggling. “He has been involved in drug running.” Kerry charged that the CIA had protected Bermudez from arrest. “The law enforcement officials know that the sting was called back in the interest of protecting the Contras,” Kerry concluded.

Following the Sandinista defeat in the 1990 elections, Bermúdez returned to Managua. Bermúdez ultimately helped manage the Contras’ transition to an opposition political. Following the Nicaraguan war, Bermudez sought a prominent position in the new government. Spurned by President Chamorro, he tried to pressure George Bush to intercede on his behalf, threatening to expose Bush’s role in the cocaine trafficking enterprise. According to Tatum, Bush ordered his disposal.

On February 16, 1991, he was killed by two gun-shots to his head in a hotel’s parking lot. He had just departed a hotel after those with whom he was meeting failed to show. In 1994, Bermúdez’ daughter, Claudia Bermúdez, told The Miami Herald: “There were a lot of people who would have benefited from having my dad put away—the Sandinistas, the Chamorro government, the United States. My dad died with a lot of information.”

Gary Webb a reporter in the Mercury News Sacramento bureau broke a news story about a group of Nicaraguan exiles who had set up a cocaine ring in California, establishing ties with the black street gangs of South Central Los Angeles who manufactured crack out of shipments of powder cocaine. Webb also reported on the profits made by the Nicaraguan exiles had been funneled back to the Contra army, with the mission of sabotaging the Sandinista revolution that had over threw the dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979.

Webb wrote, “For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the CIA.” That San Francisco drug ring was headed by a Nicaraguan exile named Norwin Meneses Cantarero. Meneses served “as the head of security and intelligence” for the leading organization in the Contra coalition, the FDN or Fuerza Democratico Nicaraguense. The FDN was headed by Enrique Bermudez and Adolfo Calero, with the help of the CIA. Meneses came from a family intimately linked to the Somoza dictatorship. One brother had been chief of police in Managua.

Two other brothers were generals in the force most loyal to Somoza, the National Guard. Norwin Meneses immigrated to the US and he ran a car theft ring and was also one of the top drug traffickers in Nicaragua, where he was known as El Rey del Drogas (the king of drugs). Meneses worked with the approval of the Somoza clan, which duly received its rake-off. The Meneses gang murdered the chief of Nicaragua’s customs. Owing to Norwin’s powerful family, the case was never prosecuted. The US Drug Enforcement Agency and other agencies had been keeping files on Meneses since at least 1974. Yet he was granted political refugee status in July 1979.

Meneses’s contact in Los Angeles was another Nicaraguan exile, Oscar Danilo Blandon. Blandon had left Managua in June 1979, on the eve of Somoza’s downfall. The son of a Managua slumlord, Blandon had headed Somoza’s agricultural export program. Agricultural exports were an important component of the country’s mainly ranching- and coffee-based economy, with the Somoza family itself owning no less than a quarter of the nation’s agricultural land. Blandon had developed close ties to the US Department of Commerce and the US State Department. He secured $27 million in USAID funding. Blandon’s wife, Chepita, also came from a powerful clan, the Murillo family. One of her relatives was the mayor of Managua. Like many other Somoza supporters, both the Blandon and Murillo families lost most of their fortunes in the 1979 revolution.

Testifying on February 3, 1994 as a government witness before a federal grand jury investigating the Meneses family’s drug ring in San Francisco, Blandon testified that at a meeting with Meneses and Bermudez, the need for drug money to finance the Contras was proposed. “There’s a saying,” Blandon testified, “that ‘the ends justify the means.’ And that’s what Mr. Bermudez told us in Honduras.” In 1981 alone, Blandon later testified, the Meneses ring moved 900 kilos of cocaine.

In 1981 alone, Blandon later testified, the Meneses ring moved 900 kilos of cocaine and two years later the numbers had surged to around 5,000 kilos a year At that time the wholesale price of a kilo of cocaine was $50,000 or a total of $250,000,000 per year. The powder cocaine at this time was being converted into a more highly addictive called “crack.” Several law enforcement officers have complained publicly that actions targeted against Meneses were blocked by NSC officers in the Reagan administration and by the CIA.

In February 1983 the FBI had scored one of the largest cocaine seizures in California history, the Frogman case. Members of the Meneses drug syndicate had been caught attempting to swim ashore at the San Francisco docks from a Colombian freighter, with 400 pounds of cocaine. According to the DEA, the drugs had a street value at that time of more than $100 million.

During the trial of Frogman, on November 28, 1984, Carlos Cabezas testified that this cocaine-smuggling operation was a funding source for the Contras. Furthermore, he testified that the cocaine he brought into the US came from Norwin Meneses’s ranch in Costa Rica. His testimony at the trial was limited, because the judge would not allow the defense to explore the CIA’s role in any detail. In a later British TV documentary, Cabezas said that the CIA was aware of, and in fact had supervised it.

DEA agent Susan Smith began an investigation of Norwin Meneses. Smith had picked up rumors that a group of Nicaraguan exiles headed by Meneses was selling cocaine and sending money and weapons back to Central America. She checked the DEA files on Meneses and found a bulging record of the man’s criminal activities, dating back to a 1978 FBI report charging that Norwin and his brother Ernest were “smuggling 20 kilos of cocaine at a time into the United States.” One of the entry points for Meneses’s cocaine was apparently New Orleans, where Smith came across records from the DEA’s “Operation Alligator.” This government sting had busted a large cocaine ring in New Orleans. One of the arrested men, Manuel Porro, told DEA agent Bill Cunningham that Meneses was the source of the cocaine. However, Meneses was never arrested.

Smith’s superiors abruptly terminated her investigation and she was reassigned to cover drug dealing by motorcycle gangs in Oakland. Despite her huge file on Meneses, Smith told Gary Webb, DEA managers evinced no interest. Smith quit the DEA in 1984.

Dennis Ainsworth, a former Cal State/Hayward economics professor who was a well-connected Reagan Republican and active in the Contra cause. Ainsworth gave a detailed interview to the FBI on February 27, 1987, that has now been declassified. In this interview, Ainsworth not only backed the contention that Meneses was using drug profits to buy weapons for the Contras, but also gave details of how US Customs and DEA agents “felt threatened and intimidated by National Security interference in legitimate narcotics smuggling investigations.” DEA had a drug file on Meneses “two feet thick.

In 1987, Jack Blum, an investigator for Senator John Kerry’s committee, was probing the stories of Contra drug running. Blum and Kerry called US District Attorney Joseph P. Russoniello, to ask about the Frogman case. Blum recalled during his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on October 23, 1996 and stated, “We had a telephone conversation with Mr. Russoniello and he shouted at us. He accused us of being subversives for wanting to get into it.” Julio Zavala, a brother-in-law of Cabezas had had $36.800 cash on him when arrested with the other Frogmen. During his arrest, FBI agents seized $36,800. Russoniello had been urged by the CIA to return the drug money to Zavala and he got his money back, but went to prison after conviction.

Meneses was finally arrested in 1990 in Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan police and the Nicaraguan judge presiding over Meneses’s trial expressed outrage that the United States had known about the drug lord’s activities for fifteen years, but had never arrested him.

In Somoza’s final days, President Jimmy Carter had made a last-ditch effort to maintain a US-backed regime in Nicaragua even if Somoza should be forced to quit. The plan was to preserve the bloodthirsty National Guard as the custodian of US interests. When this plan failed and the Sandinistas swept to power, Carter ordered the initial organization of what later became known as the Contras, operating out of Honduras. The CIA mustered Argentinian officers fresh from their own death squad campaigns, and these men began to organize the exiled National Guardsmen into a military force. Duane “Dewey” Clarridge was the CIA officer in charge of covert operations in Latin America.

The initial appropriation was meager, amounting to only $19 million in 1982 for the CIA’s covert operations against Nicaragua. In the spring of 1982 such covert costs soared when the Argentinians who had been supervising day-to-day military training for the fledgling Contra force in Honduras pulled out at the onset of the Falklands/Malvinas War. Later that year, Congress moved to restrict CIA aid for the Contras. At the last second Rep. Edward Boland of Massachusetts introduced an amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill for fiscal 1983, prohibiting the CIA from spending any money “for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua.” The Agency was given only $21 million outside Boland’s restrictions for activities related to the Contras.

In December 1983 Congress capped Contra funding for fiscal 1984 at only $24 million. The shortfall was what drove Robert McFarlane and Oliver North to hunt for alternative sources of funding—for example, asking the Saudis for $1 million a month. Clarridge went on a similar mission to South Africa. North was in the process of setting up covert bank accounts in mid-1984.

In April 1984, it emerged that the CIA had undertaken the mining of Nicaraguan harbors. The political uproar in the US resulted in the most restrictive of the Boland amendments, passed by Congress in October 1984. During fiscal 1985, the amendment read, “no funds available to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, or any other agency or entity of the United States involved in intelligence activities may be obligated or expended for the purpose or which have the effect of supporting, directly or indirectly, military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua by any nation, group, organization, movement, or individual.” The year 1985 also marked the peak of the Meneses-Blandon drug sales, at the time of the CIA’s greatest need for money for its Contra army. The Boland amendment expired on October 17, 1986, and immediately the portion of the CIA budget allocated for the Contras rose to $100 million.

One of Hitz’s most dramatic findings was evidence implicating Southern Air Transport, the principal airline of North’s Iran-contra operations and a former CIA-owned airline.

In the mid-1980s, Southern Air flew missiles to Iran as well as supplies to the contras. SAT crewmen were involved in one flight that was shot down over Nicaragua on Oct. 5, 1986, exposing part of North’s Iran-contra network.

After that event, Attorney General Edwin Meese III briefly blocked a federal investigation into Southern Air on national security grounds. On Oct. 8, 1998, CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz confirmed they knew about the cocaine trafficking by contra forces. Hitz identified more than 50 contras and contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade. He stated that the Reagan administration protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations which threatened to expose these crimes in the mid-1980s.

Hitz published evidence that drug trafficking and money laundering tracked directly into Reagan’s National Security Council where Lt. Col. Oliver L. North oversaw contra operations.

Hitz revealed that the CIA placed an admitted drug money launderer, one of the CIA contract agents, in charge of the Southern Front contras in Costa Rica. Hitz made clear that the contra war took precedence over law enforcement and that the CIA withheld evidence of contra crimes from the Justice Department, the Congress and even the CIA’s own analytical division.

On one occasion in 1989, Tatum was tasked by the Defense Intelligence Agency, to go and interview Ellis Mackenzie (sp?) in Honduras. When he got down there, we found Ellis Mackenzie was actually an employees of CIA officer and pilot Berry Seal. Seal had used his name when he was dealing with the Colombians. Berry Seal was working for Oliver North and George Bush in the drug for arms operations with the Contra. Mackenzie was trying to implicate a Col. Castro of the Honduran Air Force, who was one of our people, in some independent drug-running, and Tatum wanted to find out if Castro was indeed involved in that, so that was one of the purposes.

It should be noted here that Berry Seal was a CIA officer and pilot who as admitted flying drugs into Mena, AR and had personal contact with Vice Pres. Bush and Oliver North. He also accused Bill Clinton of being part of the conspiracy to traffic in drugs and arms in and out of Mena, AR. Tatum recalls being present during a meeting between Oliver North, Felix Rodríguez, Amiram Nir and General Alvarez from Honduras, when North stated that Vice President Bush was going to have his son Jeb arrange “something out of Columbia”. This conversation focused on Barry Seal’s increasingly notorious activities. When Tatum later heard Seal had died in 1986 and he immediately understood who was behind the killing. Seal was allegedly gun down by a Medellín cartel assassination squad. In other words, Tatum is suggesting that Seal was probably assassinated by the Pegasus archer-team.

Tatum states that he flew to Little Rock Air Force Base. He was met by three vehicles, a plain, unmarked police vehicle, a limo, and a van. Out of the limo stepped Dr. Dan Lasater, who we delivered several coolers to. He walked over with another man, introduced the other man as thegovernor of Arkansas. We had two coolers, a heavy one, a light one marked “donor organs, and the heavy one, it was all cocaine, and the light one, there was three kilos of cocaine and money.”

Tatam stated that he gave over 110 kilos to Lasater and three kilos went with Governor Clinton Clinton and Jackson Stephens were in the limo. These guys were accompanied by a plain-clothes policeman, Mr. Young, Buddy, Governor Clinton’s bodyguard. Dan Lasater was later convicted of drug-trafficking.

Prior flying, Tatum looked inside the coolers marked medical supplies, and on finding the cocaine and cash, he then took some $25,000 out of it, left an I.O.U. in the cooler. He then sent that 25,000 to Bill Colby, and I asked him what was going on. “I called him on the phone, and over-nighted the money to him, asked him what the heck was going on here. And he said, “Chip, just stay out of it.”

Tatum states that this big operation was called “Operation Green Belt.” He says it was very easy to launder drug profits in the construction business. “By utilizing construction moneys, a small mortgage-company or a mortgage-lender could go in, and they could provide construction-loans to builders, and that’s the one thing a builder is always shy of, you know, he needs construction-money. They go into the building-profession, it gives the builder an opportunity to get cash, and then get the money and get the house up in an expedited fashion.”

He states this money laundering occurred in Colorado, Ohio, and in Arkansas. “The money from Mena, Arkansas, Arkansas Development Finance Authority, that money went to Rostenkowski’s bank in Chicago and a BCCI Bank in Atlanta and also one in Florida. Neil Bush was involved in banking in Denver, Colorado at that time, right in the middle of everything. Mr Milman (sp?), with his group, Larry Mizell and the MDC Group, all of that group heavily involved in illegal moneys.---------CIA contract pilot and front company manager, Terry Reed, has worked closely with the late Barry Seal and he tells all this in his book, Compromised, co-written with veteran journalist John Cummings.

Rodney Stich, wrote in his book, Defrauding America that former FBI asset Darlene Novinger was a “former FBI operative who reportedly discovered during an FBI investigation that Vice President George Bush and two of his sons were using drugs and prostitutes in a Florida hotel while Bush was vice president.””She reported her findings to FBI supervisors and then (was) warned no to repeat what she had discovered.” According to Reed, “the FBI had inserted a female undercover agent into the inner circle of Medellin Cartel founder Pablo Escobar. Her name was Darlene Novinger and she got very close to an Escobar cousin named Steve Plata.”

“Novinger had been requested to infiltrate drug trafficking operations in South America and the United States. She was pressured to quit her FBI position; her husband was beaten to death; and four hours after she appeared on a July 1993 talk show describing her findings (after she was warned not to appear), her father mysteriously died. A dead white canary was left on his grave as a warning to her. After receiving death threats she went into hiding”.

According to a later 1998 edition of Defrauding America, Novinger was a former investigator for the Federal Crime Task Force working with the FBI as a confidential informant. She was not paid a salary, either, but received periodic payments based upon assets seized or the value government agents placed upon her information.

Her success led her to be assigned to Atlanta and she discovered the involvement of the Smatt family, headed by William Smatt with a the Lebanese Phlangee drug trafficking group.

Novinger said that “the investigations showed that the drug trafficking operation involving the Smatt group also implicated Vice President George Bush and his son Jeb.” Novinger said that after submitting the report to the FBI concerning Bush’s involvement, orders came from Washington to stop the entire investigation and destroy all reports.

During the investigation of this case, a veteran U.S. Customs investigator Joe Price, had filed similar reports involving high level drug trafficking, including the George Bush involvement. “After Price had filed his report in September 1983 concerning Bush’s involvement in drugs, the FBI arrested Price on false narcotics trafficking charges.”

A private investigator Stewart A. Webb claims that George Jr., Jeb, Neil Bush and George Bush Sr. are implicated in many top level criminal activities. Webb had been investigating government corruption since 1986. Webb uncovered key evidence linking government officials with illegal drug smuggling and money laundering, as well as data on the Savings & Loan Scandal of the 1980’s. In his research, Webb also discovered the connection between the so-called HUD scandals in which $50 billion was stolen in U.S.

Department of Housing and Urban Development fraud and the Junk Bond Scams/Loan Swaps of Michael Milken, Larry Mizel and Charles Keating which claimed over $6 billion.

Stew Webb claims to have evidence that Leonard Yale Millman (MDC Holdings, National Brokerage Companies) has been one of George Bush’s primary money launderers for the last 20 years. “MDC Holdings is a large Denver based home builder and residential developer headed by Larry Mizel,” Webb tried to get his findings presented to a Grand Jury and had could get a dozen secret witnesses selected from more than 200 potential witnesses, but this never happened. Webb stated that these witnesses would testify about Leonard Yale Millman, Larry Mizel (MDC Holdings), Norman Brownstein (chairman of the board of Denver law firm and Director, MDC Holdings) and others involved in an ongoing criminal enterprise.” Brownstein he is considered to be one of the country’s top five campaign fund-raisers at the national level.

The CIA knew the criminal nature of its contra clients from the start of the war against Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. The earliest contra force, called ADREN or the 15th of September Legion, had chosen “to stoop to criminal activities in order to feed and clothe their cadre,” according to a June 1981 draft CIA field report. ADREN employed terrorist methods, including the bombing of Nicaraguan civilian planes and hijackings. The CIA corroborated the allegations about ADREN’s cocaine trafficking.

In the Southern Front, in Costa Rica, the drug evidence centered on the forces of Eden Pastora, another leading contra commander. Hitz revealed that the CIA’s contract agent, an admitted drug operative—known by his CIA code name, “Ivan Gomez” – was tasked by the CIA to supervise and control the activities of Pastora.

Another Pegasus assassination was that of General Gustavo (Dr Gus) Alvarez Martinez, the “cooperating” Honduran Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief. Alvarez was assassinated in 1989, following his demand for a bigger split of the cocaine profits. Tatum also describes his involvement in the assassination of Amiram Nir, the former Israeli Mossad agent who went under the assumed name of Pat Weber. Nir was scheduled to testify to the Senate subcommittee and it was feared he would reveal the truth. He perished, following the shooting-down of his aircraft with missiles from Tatum’s helicopter.

The following is Chip Tatum account how someone was neutralized.

One method of killing someone uses a binary poison “The first section of the compound is given to the target, and then, within three weeks, you can hit him with the second part, so it never shows up as a poison, but it does give him a heart attack and all the symptoms of a heart attack, and it is a heart attack. However, you don’t – an autopsy doesn’t reveal a poison, it just reveals a compound that’s normally found in the body.

Tatum goes on to state that in 1990, when Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega announced there would be “free elections”, a Mr.X (name withheld) was ecstatic. He began jostling for position and asked President Bush to ensure he be given a prominent position in the new Nicaraguan government - in return for his years of toil at the behest of the CIA and in Oliver North, et. al, Enterprise. The pressure came in a form that Bush could not ignore. Failure to help his friend would result in X’s intimate knowledge of Bush’s involvement in the dope trade being made public. His threat left Bush with a sour taste. A Pegasus team was assigned to “neutralize” him in early 1990.

Tatum states, Mr. X, “fancied himself a lover of women. Tall, large-breasted blondes were his favorites. It was determined that, if effectively neutralized, Mr. X could be an asset. Therefore, it was decided that intimidation would be used to control him.”

They chose to use the drug Scopolamine, which also went by the nickname “Burundanga” or “the Voodoo drug”. The drug is extracted from the pods of a flowering shrub that grows in remote regions of South America. In its processed, powdered form, Scopolamine is “void of smell, void of taste”. When properly administered “it causes absolute obedience” without this being “observable by others”. Importantly, the target will not recall any of the events that occurred during the period they were under the spell of the drug.

Dr Camilo Uribe, head of Bogotá’s toxicology clinic, says “it’s like chemical hypnotism” and confirmed that this drug is well known to cause both amnesia and a zombie-like trance in which the target follows all orders. See Wall Street Journal, 3 July 1995.

In outlining these details, Tatum adds that it is important to administer the drug in the correct dosage, for he has known targets to die from too high a dose. Others have “remained under the influence of Burundanga for up to three weeks”. Precise dosage can be achieved by liquid ingestion, the powder being readily soluble. Ingestion via cigarettes is also an optimum method of ingestion. It is fast-acting and takes no more than 20 minutes to work.

Tatum states that X was invited to spend a relaxing weekend at a luxury hotel as a guest of his friend George Bush. His host for the weekend was a trusted 18-year veteran field-intelligence officer. The evening started with cocktails and was followed by a fine meal. “’Nothing but the best’ were the orders.”

Following the meal, he was ushered into the suite of a “blonde bombshell” supplied by the CIA. Mr. X had already ingested a dose of Burundanga during pre-dinner cocktails. X was gallant with the blonde as they both moved into the bedroom where video cameras were already set up in one corner. In short order, the blonde had X standing naked in front of her and began to indulge his desires. All the while, the video cameras whirred. Slowly stripping off, the “blonde” revealed his manhood in all its glory. Mr. X was instructed to reciprocate the favor and perform fellatio. He obliged, his intimate activities recorded at 24 frames a second on videotape.

Tatum says the male prostitute was hired from a bar in New York. Two weeks later, X - wholly unaware of the events of that evening - was visited in Nicaragua. He was presented with a copy of the video footage, along with instructions. Tatum says that X can never allow that video to be seen: “Not only does it reveal his homosexuality, but it also reveals his bestiality and satanic worship rituals.” Mr. X reportedly wept, as he was forced to watch the video tape of himself killing his homosexual “lover” and then engage in the most grisly cannibalistic ritual imaginable.

Neutralized, Mr. X became a leading member of the Nicaraguan government a few short weeks later.

Tatum states, Mr. X was a leader of one of the largest CIA-backed Contra group and had testified before the US Senate Intelligence Committee. Formerly, X was a senior executive in a South American subsidiary of a leading US soft drinks corporation.

The CIA installed Adolfo Calero, formerly the Coca-Cola concessionaire in Managua, as the FDN’s civilian head, operating mainly out of the United States, where he was under tight CIA supervision.

During his Senate testimony, he denied any knowledge of CIA involvement in the narcotics trade, adding that condoning such activity would have been foreign to his way of life. Not so, says Tatum. Mr X had been recruited into the CIA by then-Director William Casey, with the assistance of Oliver North.

SETCO was an air services company owned the Perez brothers. They were associated with Juan Matta Ballesteros, a major cocaine kingpin connected to the murder of a DEA agent, according to reports by the DEA and U.S. Customs. Despite its drug ties to Matta Ballesteros, SETCO emerged as the principal company for ferrying supplies to the contras in Honduras.

During congressional Iran-contra hearings, FDN political leader Adolfo Calero testified that SETCO was paid from bank accounts controlled by Oliver North. SETCO also received $185,924 from the State Department for ferrying supplies to the contras in 1986.

Tatum claims he was tasked to take a large briefcase with about 23 million dollars in it and deposit it in the amalgamated account in Panama. The money came from Clinton, was delivered at the embassy in Tegucigalpa and it was to go to Gen. Noriega.

According to Tatum, a deal was arranged in the early to mid-eighties between VP George Bush and Panama’s Manuel Noriega. Pablo Escobar the Colombian Cocaine king had deposited sum of $8 billion in the Banco Nacional de Panama. VP George Bush arranged for a short term loan of $8 billion from the Banco Nacional de Panama.

In the late sixties or early seventies, the CIA had secretly provided to the Shah of Iran a perfect set of printing plates that could reproduce $100 bills without blemish, aka super bills. . Also provided was an intaglio printing press. This special printing press ensures that the etched plate meets paper with tremendous force, creating the distinctive embossed feel of a genuine banknote. In addition, the Shah was also given the ink and banknote quality paper enabling him to produce perfect counterfeit US Dollar banknotes. The Shah later fled Iran and left the plates and press behind in his confusion.

Of the money from Escobar account, $4 billion was shipped by plane to Iran where it was exchanged at a ratio of one good bill for two counterfeit super bills. On the return trip, the aircraft, an 707 cargo container carried two shrink-wrapped pallets, each containing $4 billion in counterfeit bills. The 707 arrived at Howard/Albrook Air Force base in Panama where the pallets were off-loaded under armed guard of the Panamanian military. The $8 billion in counterfeit super bills was re-deposited back into Escobar’s account at the Panama central bank. Under no circumstances could the counterfeit bills be permitted to leave the bank vault - for fear of devaluing the US currency.

The other half of Escobar’s “good” money was placed into the hands of Nana DeBusia, the grandson of Guyana’s first democratic leader. DeBusia was chosen by the CIA’s William Casey to launder the massive sum into numerous bank accounts under the joint signature of VP George Bush and Director Casey. The next leg of the operation was to retrieve the $4 billion in real money. This was facilitated by selling the Iranians military equipment - arms, ammunition and replacement parts for weapon systems. This part of the deal was arranged by Col Oliver North on behalf of the CIA’s William Casey.

The results of these complex maneuvers were twofold. On the one hand the CIA acquired $4 billion - via the arms sales - for use in future black operations without the need to rely on Congressional oversight or authority. If later caught, Tatum says “... the CIA can report the source of funds as being from an arms transaction with Iran.” Part of these funds were used to support the Contra’s, whilst the rest disappeared down the ultra-black hole of the Company’s covert finances. Meanwhile, Nana DeBusia had begun laundering the remaining $4 billion through various banks, including the Vatican bank. For his trouble, DeBusia was entitled to take a commission amounting to $200 million.

To neutralize the CIA launderer Nana Debusia, he was indicted by the U.S. on 32 counts to include bank fraud. The CIA stepped up in his behalf and stated that it would not be in the best interest of the U.S. to prosecute Debusia. He was facing several hundred years in prison if convicted. He was subsequently acquitted on all counts. Debusia is the grandson of Guyana’s first democratic leader and owner of many U.S. and foreign banks. In 1987, DCI William Casey died of a brain tumor - just days before he would have been required to attend the Senate hearings into the Contragate affair.

Tatum says that Pres. George Bush went down in 1989, invaded Panama in order to get his hands on Noriega who double crossed him and was defiant. “By the time the US found Noriega, the news media got on it, and, when they did find him, there was too much publicity, there were too many western press around.” He was captured and later convicted and placed in federal prison under constant US guard to ensure his silence.

In July 2010 Noriega, 76 and in frail health, was extradited from Miami and sent to La Santé prison in Paris. He was sentenced to seven years in jail after a French court found him guilty of laundering of drug profits during his time in power. Noriega spent the past 20 years in jail the United States. There were estimated probably 4,000 civilians were killed, and, in order to cover up these deaths, the bodies were put in mass graves. The Panamanians discovered the graves after US left.

Tatum says that “American soldiers took people out of the cars that were going from one part of the city to the other, during the Panama invasion – these were family-members – put them face down on the ground and blew them away, shot them, killed them in cold blood.”

In 1989, Pablo Escobar was targeted by an intensive US-Colombian “War on Drugs” campaign. He flees into hiding, in fear of his life. Eventually, in 1993, he is tracked down and killed in a police shoot-out.

Tatum states Ramon Navarro was approached by an archer-team late at night, the night before he was to go and testify in a collateral trail related to Noriega. He died in an auto accident the night before.

Tatum started to become disgruntled around 1989 and making notes and keeping records as evidence of what was going on with operationPegasus was the National Security Council (NSC), the Special Situation Group and the Terrorist Incident Working Group and then the Operational Sub-Groups (OSG). In January of 1992 he finally walked out of black ops.

Tatum says that, in 1992, President Bush instructed him to “neutralize” presidential runner Ross Perot, but he refused to do so. Tatum turned over a copy of an incriminating tape to President Bush, explaining that it would not be released - providing that he, his family and Perot were kept safe. He also told the President that copies of the tape had been placed in six different locations worldwide, saying, “if I didn’t contact these capsule-holders by a certain time each year, they are to be sent to the addresses on the packaging”. He closed the conversation by stating that when he originally “placed the packages, I gave explicit instructions that if I asked for them to be sent back to me, they were to send them to the addresses on the packages.”

Tatum says he is only exposing direct evidence against the crimes, which include violations of the RICO Act, are Mr. North, Mr. Barr, Don Gregg, several members of the Bush staff, including Mr. Bush. Tatum says he will not expose what he calls the “Olympic Cartel,” I have not exposed and I will protect that information, and I will protect them.” It’s the group of men who are working with Mr. Bush et al., who are overseeing everything. They’re not working in just drugs. They’re working in food, they’re working in oil, they’re working in anything that can control the world economy. Groups like the International Trilateral Commission and Bilderbergers.

In 1996, Chip Tatum self-published his book about all this and copyrighted it through the Library of Congress, and he sent a copy to the White House library. David Guyatt is a freelance investigative journalist whose former career in stock broking and banking gave him the background that inspired his research into the shady world of international weapons financing, drug-running and money laundering. Guyatt states Tatum’s covert role in the CIA is additionally confirmed by military papers provided to he got a hold of. In one dated 1974, Tatum’s assignment orders were “cut” by a Lt General USAF (name redacted) who was Chief Military Intelligence Adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

David Guyatt also had a copy of a TWIX message from the Commander US Forces, Honduras (Task Force Bravo), stating to his superiors that “It has become increasingly evident during the past six weeks that Medevac A/C, in direct support of JTFs, in some cases are being utilized for other than Medevac requirements and are being controlled by other than Medevac Officials.” Tatum says he obtained a copy of this message from his Pegasus controller.

Guyatt also got a copy of Tatum’s full book manuscript, “Operation Red Rock”, together with a letter he sent to William Colby, dated 6 March 1996, which threaten: “I will not only write about the missions but about the NWO (new world order) timetable and planned events, including a chronology. And I will name names.” Tatum says that, through 1985, “aviation support” for Pegasus was primarily out of Palmerola Air Base, Honduras. Ilopango Air Base is in El Salvador and it had “operational” support. Tatum told Guyatt that he had limited flights to Bluefields Air Base, Nicaragua, but “primarily the military aircraft used were USAF C-141s and C-130s at Palmerola, La Mesa and San Lorenzo, Honduras. At San Lorenzo there were also civilian aircraft, including civilian C-123s.”

In addition to flying rotary-wing aircraft, Tatum was also competent flying smaller fixed-wing craft. He had access to both at Fort Drum.

John Perkins alleges in his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, that Torrijos was assassinated by American interests, who had a bomb planted aboard his aircraft. The alleged motive is that some American business leaders and politicians strongly opposed the negotiations between Torrijos and a group of Japanese businessmen who were promoting the idea of a new, larger, sea-level canal. Just three months after Ecuadorian president Jaime Roldós died in strikingly similar circumstances. Tatum said that when Pegasus kills someone they use “compound poisons and so forth that imitate heart attacks and don’t show up… Neutralizations and assassinations aren’t blatant, but sometimes they are. Pegasus will use a South African to kill a leader in Sweden. OSG-1 was the arms-trading arm. The arms-business is what is what caused the death of the prime minister of Sweden.”

There was a connection between George Bush, North, Don Gregg and Olof Palme. Olof Palme was a prime minister of Sweden. One of the things that needed to be done was to get, for all the weapons that were being purchased for the Contras and built-in without serial numbers End-user certificates for all these weapons needed to be obtained, so that it could be stated the weapons came from a different country than the United States, for example Sweden, because the Boland Amendment didn’t allow the Reagan administration to provide weaponry into Honduras and El Salvador. Olof Palme chose not to participate and he was dead within weeks, assassinated in 1986.

Tatum claims that in 1989, Vice President Bush gave the order to President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, so he agreed to have elections. Members of an alignment subgroup went in, told Ortega what date they would assassinate his second cousin, who was a very good friend of his (intimidated and coerced). They told him to put as many armies around that man that he wanted, but that man was going to die. That man died on that date. Two weeks later, President Ortega announced that there would be free elections. Tatum is aware of 18 of these types of missions involving national leaders of other countries but did not say whether people were murdered or how.

[...]

In addition to flying rotary-wing aircraft, Tatum was also competent flying smaller fixed-wing craft. He had access to both at Fort Drum.

Tatum also exposes "Air America" which is now Evergreen who have built the next generation chemtrail planes.

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

Before he died in an ineptly performed ‘suicide,’ the young journalist Danny Casolaro was working on a book that he claimed tied together many of the ‘gates’ and ‘miniscandals’ surrounding the Bush presidency. The book identified the web which tied all the scandals together as the “Octopus,” a mythical creature with tentacles stretching everywhere. Perhaps the birth of the Octopus lies in the 1980 Presidential election; and its growth occurred under the eight years of the Reagan presidency. Casolaro soon found that the Octopus may have consisted of a ‘shadow government’ apparatus that went back even further than Bush and Reagan. But what’s left of his notes seem primarily to focus on events in the 80s and 90s.It is very possible that in 1980, Bill Casey and other members of the Reagan team may have conspired with the Iranians to delay the release of the American hostages: they were afraid of an “October Surprise” which might damage Reagan’s chances of defeating Carter. Sure enough, the hostages were released right as Reagan was being inaugurated, and in 1981, the first shipment of arms to Iran began. Gunther Rossbacher, an ex-Navy pilot, and two other foreign sources, insist that on October 21st and 22nd, Bush met with Iranian delegates in Paris. The “October Surprise” may have been how Bush and other Reagan team members located the Iranian ‘moderates’ that played a role in the Iran-Contra scandal. In 1984, the Boland amendment forbade any more military assistance to the Contras. So, in 1985, the underground “Enterprise” – Operation Yellowfruit – began selling arms to Iran and using the proceeds to furnish weapons to the Contras. George Bush claims Iran-Contra has nothing to do with him, but other administration figures’ records show he was at the secret meetings – Poindexter, in particular. Amiram Nir, an Israeli terrorism expert, insists he discussed Iranian arms deals with Bush, but that can’t be confirmed… he died in a mysterious plane crash in Mexico in 1988.

It turns out the Iran-Contra scandal may have been part of a larger arms-for-hostages deal. The Iranians needed weapons in their war against Iraq, and the Reagan administration felt that the Iranians might have been able to convince the Shiite terrorists in Lebanon to release the American hostages held there. Reagan claimed no “quid pro quo,” but then he also claimed he really didn’t remember much, either. In any case, additional hostages were seized after the ‘non-deal’, and many may remain in captivity today, including the Lebanon CIA station head. One man who may have known a great deal about the Iran-Contra business was Manuel Noriega, whose name came up in the 1988 Dukakis-Bush debates. Noriega knew about the Contra drug pipeline, because he was a pusher, himself, while on the CIA payroll throughout the 1980s, and during his trial in Miami in 1989, some testimony emerged which suggested he knew something about the Central American end of the Iran-Contra affair and where some on the missing money may have ‘disappeared’ into.

On the Middle Eastern end, another man who was a delighted beneficiary of American generosity throughout the 1980s was Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The Agriculture Department and other agencies gave Saddam agricultural credits worth millions of dollars which he used to purchase American attack helicopters, chemical weapons for using on the Kurds, and the components of a nuclear weapons program. It is suspected that the CIA and Justice Department overlooked, or aided, the Banco Nazionale Lavoro (BNL) of Italy while it funneled billions in military aid to Iraq. This recently burgeoning scandal, “Iraqgate,” suggests we were playing both sides against the middle during the Iran-Iraq war. We were selling arms to both the Iranians and the Iraqis, and the CIA at various points double-crossed both sides. It is no wonder that America is so distrusted in that part of the world. In any case, there were two men that knew too much, and when Bush became president, he had to clean them up, and he would wage two “cleanup wars” to do it.

One link between Bush, Saddam, and Iran-Contra was the corrupt Middle Eastern bank, the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI). BCCI, it turns out, laundered drug money, financed CIA and Mossad covert operations, and helped Bush, Saddam, and others split over $250 billion in extortion from the sale of Persian Gulf oil. (BCCI also might have had links to the corrupt drug-money-laundering-and-CIA scandals involving Australia’s Nugan Hand Bank.) Attorney General Richard Thornburgh squashed an investigation into First American Bankshares, secretly controlled by BCCI, in October 1990; and William von Raab, former U.S. customs official, was fired by Treasury Secretary James Brady for delving too deeply into BCCI. This may have a lot to do with the links between Prescott Bush, First American director Stephens, Bahrain, and Iraq. Bush’s family were oilmen, and if there is anything he stood for, it was Big Oil and its interests in the Middle East. (It might be pointed out, incidentally, that it was Norman Schwarzkopf’s father who helped boot out Mossadegh in Iran when he threatened to nationalize holdings of British Petroleum.) The mess was in place, and President Bush had a lot of cleaning up to do.

The “Cleanup Wars”

The first “cleanup war” was so-called Operation Just Cause in Panama. We invaded with the ostensibly ‘just’ cause of arresting a drug dealer and bringing him to justice here in the U.S.. The fact that he was the leader of another country, and that this is a violation of international law, didn’t raise a naysayer, although insiders knew that Noriega was working for us before Bush started to see him as a threat. He may have wanted to jail Noriega because of the Iran-Contra secrets he knew. The other ostensible reason was because of Bush family holdings in Panama. It seems that Prescott’s friends in the Aoki Corporation of Japan have invested more than $350 million in Panama; their holdings include the luxury resort Caesar Park and the Mariott Hotel. Bush may have been afraid of Noriega nationalizing that property. While Bush claimed to be nailing a dealer, he replaced him with two other dope pushers. Panamanian president Guillermo Endara is a director of the bank used exclusively by the Medellin cartel, and vice president Guillermo Ford is part owner of Dadeland Bank of Florida, which stands accused of laundering South American drug money. This Bush cleanup cost 26 American and 2000 Panamanian (civilian) lives, and several million dollars. It’s worth seeing the film The Panama Deception to see some of the chilling secrets of this operation, including hidden mass graves of murdered civilians.The second ‘cleanup war’ was Operation Desert Storm, with the purposes of ostensibly ‘liberating’ Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. It is clear that, in fact, administration official April Glaspie succeeded in goading Hussein into invading Kuwait by saying that the U.S. would not interfere. And that the CIA and NSC provided doctored sattelite photographs making it look like Iraq was preparing to invade Saudi Arabia, when in fact Iraqi troops were nowhere near the Saudi border; further, that the CIA deliberately payed no attention to Iraqi troop buildup prior to the invasion of Kuwait. And that the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, appearing under a pseudonym, told a false story about how Iraqi soldiers were ripping Kuwaiti babies out of incubators. Saddam Hussein had been set up, and now so were the American people, who Bush promised this was about “jobs” and dealing with America’s “VietNam syndrome.”

The Desert Storm war never accomplished any of its supposed goals. Kuwait does not have ‘democracy,’ only a returned monarchy hell-bent on seeking blood vengeance on Palestinian citizens. Saddam Hussein was not toppled from power; and the Kurds who were incited to rise up against him received no U.S. help when Republican Guard American-made attack helicopters mowed them down. Saddam’s chemical and nuclear arsenal were never eliminated. Instead, what was destroyed was the Iraqi infrastructure, causing thousands to suffer disease, hunger, and deprivation, in addition to the thousands who died in the ‘smart’ bombings which nonetheless hit plenty of civilian targets; and the environment of the Persian Gulf, when eco-terrorist Saddam Hussein dumped millions of gallons of oil out of his wells and set ablaze thousands of Kuwaiti oil wells. It was a pyrrhic victory, but not for American oil companies, who profited mightily from increased oil prices… and for George Bush, who used his “VietNam syndrome therapy” as an excuse to hold hundreds of parades celebrating his ‘victory’ nationwide with yellow ribbons and marching soldiers.

The Wackenhut Connection

The Wackenhut Security Corporation of Miami, Florida, has long been suspected of being a CIA front. The right-wing politics of George Wackenhut, who had ties to Belgian fascists and South American death squads, are well known. But few people realize that Wackenhut, a small company with “only a few” employees, gets some choice assignments, including guarding nuclear reactors, nuclear weapons facilities, the Alaskan Oil pipeline, and several American embassies; or that its board of directors contains several luminaries from the FBI, CIA, and Army Intelligence, including Bobby Ray Inman. Wackenhut has led a covert crusade against whistleblowers at many nuclear power plants, using wiretaps to eavesdrop on them and various ‘subtle’ techniques to convince them not to talk; it also spied on Chuck Hamel, a critic of the Aleyska Oil Consortium’s drilling policies, by setting up a fake environmental-law firm which sought to “pump” him for his sources. Wackenhut may have even used some operatives to try and help topple President Perez of Venezuela through a (failed) military coup, largely for money (rather than politics) it was given by Blanca Ibanez, the mistress of Jaime Luinschi, the former president.Also, a Wackenhut employee named Ernesto Bermudez was using 1500 ‘employees’ in El Salvador for things he admitted “you wouldn’t want your mother to know about” to a reporter from Spy magazine. Candian PM Pierre Trudeau refused to allow Wackenhut to purchase a weapons-propellant plant in Quebec, and it was refused a permit to open a security facility in France because President Francois Mitterand said “we had just gotten rid of the CIA.” Wackenhut maintained files on over 4 million suspected ‘subversives’ of all types, including civil rights activists and antiwar protesters, well into the 1960s, making it the largest private holder of such information. In 1975, after a Congressional investigation into domestic intelligence operations and connections to private firms, Wackenhut turned its files over to the Anti-Communist Church League of America based in Wheaton, Illinois, which is now defunct. Florida Governor Claude Kirk claims to have worked closely with Wackenhut to “fight organized crime,” although insiders maintain they were doing anything but fighting the Mob.

But there are direct links between Wackenhut and the ‘Octopus’. It appears that Michael Riconsciuto, a convicted drug dealer, claims to have met with George Wackenhut, John Amarell (of Wackenhut’s Executive Board), and Dr. John Philip Nichols (a CIA operative conducting shady activities on the Cabazon Indian Reservation in the California desert) in Las Vegas in the early 80s to discuss the theft of Inslaw’s PROMIS software; he says Wackenhut asked him “how his software work was coming along.” (Supposedly, Nichols was using the Cabazon reservation as his own private munitions proving ground, testing things ranging from super-lethal Fuel-Air Explosives and chemical-biological weapons to Electromagnetic Pulse [EMP] generators.) Ammarell confirms the meeting, but claims it was merely about the sale of a boat! Retired general Richard Secord arranged for the Wackenhut Corp. to work with Iraqi arms dealer Ihsan Barbouti; Wackenhut operative David Ramirez claims that he and Barbouti rode in a truck carrying chemical-weapons technology from Texas to Chicago, and then rode on a plane to Iraq. Ramirez indicates that he thinks Wackenhut may have been part of a “food stamp” scheme to get agricultural credits for Iraq which were in turn used to purchase nuclear-weapons technology, making Wackenhut part of the Iraqgate affair as well.

Assisting with Barbouti’s arms schemes were two partners, James Tully (who sent Bill Clinton’s ‘draft-dodge’ letter to ABC) and Jack Brennan, who currently works as director of administrative operations in President Bush’s office. Brennan and Tully had been involved in a $181 million deal to supply uniforms for the Iraqi army, arranging them to be manufactured in Ceausescu’s Romania, of all places. Other partners in that deal were Watergate felon John Mitchell and Sarkis Soghnalian, a Lebanese citizen who was credited with introducing Saddam Hussein to Gerald Bull, the inventor of the so-called “supergun.” Soghnalian is currently in prison for selling 103 military helicopters to Iraq; and David Ramirez says that Wackenhut considered the Turkish man to be a “valuable client.” Two thousand gallons of ferrocyanide – an important chemical-warfare binary ingredient – vanished from a Boca Raton cherry flavoring factory in 1990. That plant was guarded by – guess who – Wackenhut.

Barbouti owned shares in that company, and two others: TK-7, which makes a fuel additive that could extend the range of liquid-fueled missiles such as the SCUD, and Pipeline Recovery Systems, which coats pipes to make them useable in nuclear power plants. He admits having faked his own death several times, and having helped Moammar Khadafi build his infamous chemical-weapons plant at Rabta, Libya. Further, he owns about $100 million worth of real estate and oil-drilling equipment in Texas and Oklahoma. It is widely believed that the Middle Eastern architect is either currently dead (surprise), living in Jordan, or being kept in a CIA safe house in Florida. An engineering company owned by him in Frankfurt had a $552 million contract to build airfields in Iraq. And – no surprise here – Barbouti used the corrupt BCCI bank as his middleman in many deals.

The CenTrust Connection: the S & Ls, the Mob, and BCCI

The S & L failures of ’89 were a massive blow to the banking system. Over 200 small savings and loan banks went under – just under half of those in existence – and had their assets seized by the federal ‘dummy’ company, the Resolution Trust Corp. Largely, this was a problem created by deregulation legislation passed by the congressional banking committees – the legislation allowed the S & Ls to make investments that were extremely risky and fiscally unsound. In fact, the failure can also be seen as the result of several years of deregulation of many industries under the Reagan administration – deregulation that was “bought” by the very industries which were supposed to be policed. But where were the regulators who were supposed to be the ‘watchdogs’ of the industry? Almost across the board they were ‘bought off’ by S & L moguls like Charles Keating, paid to look the other way while the S & Ls invested in fraudulent real estate schemes and sham projects which collapsed after a few years. But to maintain a veneer of solubility for their creditors, many S & Ls actually turned to “junk bond” king Michael Milliken, managing to “puff up” their investment profiles with airy money. There may have been even more crooked things going on, as some recent articles suggest that some of the S & L swindle may have gotten into the hands of the CIA and used to fund the Contras- most funds coming from the failed Palmer National Bank and Vision Savings Bank in Houston.Even more daring reports, such as a recent book by investigative reporter Peter Brewton, suggest the Mafia may have been involved with some of the bank fraud – as they most certainly were with the Vatican Bank scandal in Italy. Author Dan Moldea notes extensive connections between the Hollywood motion picture company MCA, the defense/nuclear contractor General Electric, the corrupt Teamsters’ Union, and the Mob. Strangely, former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan had connections to all of the above. The fact that there are close Republican ties to the Teamsters, despite the party’s overt anti-labor stance, is very curious; but it must be examined in the light of the Teamsters’ “patriotic” support of “guns and butter” and other right-wing stances, and their links to the Mafia. (It is widely suspected that Richard Nixon may have pardoned Jimmy Hoffa after making a deal with the Teamsters to give money to his 1972 presidential campaign – yet another unwritten chapter in the Watergate saga, along with the revelations that he may have tried to frame the Democrats for the assassination attempt on George Wallace.) Anthony Summers believes that J. Edgar Hoover was blackmailed by the Mob for his homosexuality, and that is why the former FBI director continued to deny the pervasiveness of “organized crime.” One of Brewton’s most amazing revelations is that Bush may have actively attempted to conceal the Texas oil – organized crime – S & L – CIA links during the 1988 campaign: but so did Lloyd Bentsen, who told Dukakis it would be “a losing issue for our ticket!”

The cost for fixing the S & L mess – for returning the depositors in the banks all their savings – will be quite high. Another cost involved in the process will be the liquidation of nearly valueless assets owned by the S & Ls – such as acres and acres of undeveloped land out in the Southwest. The properties of the failed S & Ls are being sold by RTC for businessmen for a steal; and taxpayers are being asked to pick up a large part of the tab. Some estimate that the S & L cleanup may cost each and every taxpayer as much as $1000. Each and every taxpayer, of the 200 million who pay taxes! There are economists who feel the beginning wave of the S & L collapse may have contributed to the massive stock market crash of 1987, and that its impact led to other bank failures and a real estate ‘bust’ contributing to the 1990 recession. Crooked S & L operators received, on the average, 2.4 years in prison for ripping off America with their white-collar crimes. But a robber who steals $200 from a convenience store gets, on average, 7.8 years. One need not be a math wizard to see something glaringly wrong with that. Why have the federal prosecutors under the Bush administration been so slow to prosecute, and so lenient with their sentences? Could it be connected to the extensive amounts of money that Bush himself got from the S & Ls during his 1988 campaign?

Was there also a link between the failed Savings & Loans and BCCI? It turns out, yes, and the (now defunct) Miami CenTrust bank chairman David Paul is the key. According to a NBC special on the S & L scandal, Dexter Lehtinen, the temporary appointee to the position of federal prosecutor for south Florida, claims he was obstructed by the government from serving subpoenas on many of the big figures connected to Paul. Lehtinen was never confirmed officially for the position after serving in it for several years – some say this was because of things in his background that might lead to a confirmation fight, but others feel it was because he was digging too deeply into CenTrust’s failures. Lehtinen now claims that Paul may have bribed many local and federal officials to cover up for money laundering and secret Carribean accounts to sequester ‘narcodollars.’ Investigators found that Paul lived a lavish lifestyle, buying gold fixtures and priceless art treasures for his office in the CenTrust building. When CenTrust was starting to face insolvency, Paul found a cash influx from an unsuspected source – BCCI financier Farouk, who tried to use CenTrust to launder money from the Banco Nazionale Lavore (BNL) in Italy. The S & L scandal is, it seems, yet another arm within the Octopus.

Bush’s Teapot Dome?: the INSLAW Affair

George Bush’s predecessor, Ronald Reagan, had a terribly corrupt administration. There were huge numbers of indictments, resignations, scandals, and accusations of corruption and coverrup. Housing and Urban Development, under Sam “the Invisible Man” Pierce, turned a blind eye as shifty Republican financiers raked in profits off of shady deals involving public housing. Savings and Loan regulators allowed S & L’s all over the country to make ridiculously unsound investments and disappear into bankruptcy. But the corruption in the Reagan administration may have been nowhere more shocking than in the Department of Justice, whose anti-pornography crusader, Edwin Meese III, was accused of improprieties regarding the transfer of a company called Wedtech.Bush’s new Attorney General, Richard Thornburgh, may have done Meese one better, bringing the Department of Injustice one step further. For it now stands accused of being a software pirate – of having stole the Inslaw PROMIS database program from its creators without recompensating them. That PROMIS is a program that can be used to track political dissidents, among other things, has been noted by many commentators. Because William Sessions of the FBI was investigating Justice’s possible role in the Inslaw/BNL affair, Attorney General William Barr suddenly launched an investigation of Session’s misuse of his phone for making personal calls and allowing his wife to be at meetings – hardly the most major of offenses among government bureaucrats! Curious infighting as the ship went down, it seems.

According to Riconsciouto, the INSLAW affair might have been, among other things, a political payoff for the role a former political operative and Justice Department official, Earl Brian, played in the October Surprise. INSLAW was originally a nonprofit organization basically of quasi-governmental nature, which went private in the 1980s in an effort to market its software commercially. PROMIS was marketed to law enforcement agencies as an efficient tool for tracking criminal cases. However, its versatility for use in such wide-ranging areas as political intelligence and monitoring caught the eye of the Justice Department – which would require modifying the program’s original design. So Brian first tried to seize INSLAW Corp. in an illegally authorized “hostile takeover,” and when that failed, basically stole the PROMIS software outright. Copies of the program were thought to be distributed or sold to, among others, Israel, South Africa, some Central American regimes, and perhaps Saddam Hussein – by the Bush administration – all without consent or compensation for the program’s original authors. It is believed that some regimes even today still use chilling, modified versions of the program for tracking political dissidents.

Is the Octopus Still Alive?: Mena, Arkansas and a Clinton Compromise

Riconsciouto claims that Clinton, like Bush, has been “compromised” by the CIA. He says that he personally flew planes carrying illegal shipments of arms to and drugs from the Contra rebels which took off from a secret airstrip near Mena, Arkansas – one which apparently existed with the full knowledge and consent of then-governor Bill Clinton. He and others think that Clinton made a basic “deal” with Bush after he won — Bush would not criticize Clinton or bring up too much about Whitewater or Mena airstrip, and in return Clinton would not pursue indictments against Bush Administration officials. Today, as the Clinton administration battles off a series of its own political scandals, writers for the alternative media still puzzle over the “mainstream” media’s total refusal to look at whatever was going at Mena, in 1992 or now. Because then-governor Clinton may have been permitting the CIA to run a small scale “black operation” right in his own state. So it’s obvious that Clinton has no interest in pursuing the Octopus, the question then becomes – even if his administration isn’t involved, does it still thrive in its own shadowy centres?Danny Casolaro may have been killed because he got too close to the truth. The Christic Institute may have been SLAPPed out of existence because of it. Even if the Octopus isn’t still operating, there are likely to be various “tentacles” of it who want to cover up the roles that they played in it. It may have branched into things that Casolaro hadn’t gotten around to investigating yet. Certainly it tied together a series of sinister forces and operations. George Bush was undoubtedly a key figure, but he isn’t going to be running for President again. What’s more tragic is the way that he and other co-conspirators may have basically gotten off scot-free. And at this point, it’s too early to tell what role Clinton and his administration may or may not be playing in keeping the creature going. Which to me is more important than any unwise land investments he and his wife may have made during the 1980s.

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

As a former Federal prosecutor, Massachusetts attorney general and U.S. Attorney General, I don’t have to be told that the appointment of a special prosecutor is justified only in exceptional circumstances. Why, then, do I believe it should be done in the case of Inslaw Inc., a small Washington-based software company? Let me explain.

Inslaw’s principal asset is a highly efficient computer program that keeps track of large numbers of legal cases. In 1982, the company contracted with the Justice Department to install this system, called Promis, in U.S. Attorneys’ offices. A year later, however, the department began to raise sham disputes about Inslaw’s costs and performance and then started to withhold payments. The company was forced into bankruptcy after it had installed the system in 19 U.S. Attorneys’ offices. Meanwhile, the Justice Department copied the software and put it in other offices.

As one of Inslaw’s lawyers, I advised its owners, William and Nancy Hamilton, to sue the department in Federal bankruptcy court. In September 1987, the judge, George Bason, found that the Justice Department used “trickery, fraud and deceit” to take Inslaw’s property. He awarded Inslaw more than $7 million in damages for the stolen copies of Promis. Soon thereafter, a panel headed by a former department official recommended that Judge Bason not be reappointed. He was replaced by a Justice Department lawyer involved in the Inslaw case.

An intermediate court later affirmed Judge Bason’s opinion. Though the U.S. Court of Appeals set that ruling aside in May of this year on the ground that bankruptcy courts have no power to try a case like Inslaw’s, it did not disturb the conclusion that “the Government acted willfully and fraudulently to obtain property that it was not entitled to under the contract.” Inslaw, which reorganized under Chapter 11, has asked the Supreme Court to review the Court of Appeals decision.

After the first court’s judgment, a number of present and former Justice Department employees gave the Hamiltons new information. Until then, the Hamiltons thought their problems were the result of a vendetta by a department official, C. Madison Brewer, whom Mr. Hamilton had dismissed from Inslaw several years before. How else to explain why a simple contract dispute turned into a vicious campaign to ruin a small company and take its prize possession?

The new claims alleged that Earl Brian, California health secretary under Gov. Ronald Reagan and a friend of Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d, was linked to a scheme to take Inslaw’s stolen software and use it to gain the inside track on a $250 million contract to automate Justice Department litigation divisions.

(In Mr. Meese’s confirmation fight, it was revealed that Ursula Meese, his wife, had borrowed money to buy stock in Biotech Capital Corporation, of which Dr. Brian was the controlling shareholder. Biotech controlled Hadron Inc., a computer company that aggressively tried to buy Inslaw.)

Evidence to support the more serious accusations came from 30 people, including Justice Department sources. I long ago gave the names of most of the 30 to Mr. Meese’s successor as Attorney General, Dick Thornburgh. But the department contacted only one of them, a New York judge.

Meanwhile, the department has resisted Congressional investigations. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations staff reported that its inquiry into Inslaw’s charges had been “hampered by the department’s lack of cooperation” and that it had found employees “who desired to speak to the subcommittee, but who chose not to out of fear for their jobs.”

The department also hindered the interrogation of employees and resisted requests for documents by the House Judiciary Committee and its chairman, Representative Jack Brooks. Under subpoena, Mr. Thornburgh produced many files but the department said that a volume containing key documents was missing.

In letters to Mr. Thornburgh in 1988 and 1989, I argued for the appointment of an independent counsel. When it became obvious that Mr. Thornburgh did not intend to reply or act, Inslaw went to court to order him to act. A year ago, the U.S. District Court ruled, incorrectly I think, that a prosecutor’s decision not to investigate, no matter how indefensible, cannot be corrected by any court.

In May 1988, Ronald LeGrand, chief investigator for the Senate Judiciary Committee, told the Hamiltons, and confirmed to their lawyers, that he had a trusted Justice Department source who, as Mr. LeGrand quoted him, said that the Inslaw case was “a lot dirtier for the Department of Justice than Watergate had been, both in its breadth and its depth.” Mr. LeGrand now says he and his friend were only discussing rumors.

Then, in 1990, the Hamiltons received a phone call from Michael Riconosciuto, an out-of-fiction character believed by many knowledgeable sources to have C.I.A. connections. Mr. Riconosciuto claimed that the Justice Department stole the Promis software as part of a payoff to Dr. Brian for helping to get some Iranian leaders to collude in the so-called October surprise, the alleged plot by the Reagan campaign in 1980 to conspire with Iranian agents to hold up release of the American Embassy hostages until after the election. Mr. Riconosciuto is now in jail in Tacoma, Wash., awaiting trial on drug charges, which he claims are trumped up.

Since that first Riconosciuto phone call, he and other informants from the world of covert operations have talked to the Hamiltons, the Judiciary Committee staff, several reporters and Inslaw’s lawyers, including me. These informants, in addition to confirming and supplementing Mr. Riconosciuto’s statements, claim that scores of foreign governments now have Promis. Dr. Brian, these informants say, was given the chance to sell the software as a reward for his services in the October surprise. Dr. Brian denies all of this.

The reported sales allegedly had two aims. One was to generate revenue for covert operations not authorized by Congress. The second was to supply foreign intelligence agencies with a software system that would make it easier for U.S. eavesdroppers to read intercepted signals.

These informants are not what a lawyer might consider ideal witnesses, but the picture that emerges from the individual statements is remarkably detailed and consistent, all the more so because these people are not close associates of one another. It seems unlikely that so complex a story could have been made up, memorized all at once and closely coordinated.

It is plausible, moreover, that preventing revelations about the theft and secret sale of Inslaw’s property to foreign intelligence agencies was the reason for Mr. Thornburgh’s otherwise inexplicable reluctance to order a thorough investigation.

Although prepared not to believe a lot they told him, Danny Casolaro, a freelance journalist, got many leads from the same informants. The circumstances of his death in August in a Martinsburg, W.Va., hotel room increase the importance of finding out how much of what they have said to him and others is true. Mr. Casolaro told friends that he had evidence linking Inslaw, the Iran-contra affair and the October surprise, and was going to West Virginia to meet a source to receive the final piece of proof.

He was found dead with his wrists and arms slashed 12 times. The Martinsburg police ruled it a suicide, and allowed his body to be embalmed before his family was notified of his death. His briefcase was missing. I believe he was murdered, but even if that is no more than a possibility, it is a possibility with such sinister implications as to demand a serious effort to discover the truth.

This is not the first occasion I have had to think about the need for an independent investigator. I had been a member of the Nixon Administration from the beginning when I was nominated as Attorney General in 1973. Public confidence in the integrity of the Watergate investigation could best be insured, I thought, by entrusting it to someone who had no such prior connection to the White House. In the Inslaw case the charges against the Justice Department make the same course even more imperative.

When the Watergate special prosecutor began his inquiry, indications of the President’s involvement were not as strong as those that now point to a widespread conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of Inslaw’s technology.

The newly designated Attorney General, William P. Barr, has assured me that he will address my concerns regarding the Inslaw case. That is a welcome departure. But the question of whether the department should appoint a special prosecutor is not one it alone should decide. Views from others in the executive branch, as well as from Congress and the public, should also be heard.

Elliot L. Richardson, a Washington lawyer, was Attorney General in the Nixon Administration.

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

Why #1:The DOJ, aware that its case management system is in dire need of automation, funds Inslaw and PROMIS. After creating a public-domain version, Inslaw makes significant enhancements to PROMIS and, aware that the US market for legal automation is worth $3 billion, goes private in the early ’80s.

Why #2:Designed as case-management software for federal prosecutors, PROMIS has the ability to combine disparate databases, and to track people by their involvement with the legal system. Hamilton and others now claim that the DOJ has modified PROMIS to monitor intelligence operations, agents and targets, instead of legal cases.

By late November, 1992 the nation had turned its attention from the election-weary capital to Little Rock, Ark., where a new generation of leaders conferred about the future. But in a small Washington D.C. office, Bill Hamilton, president and founder of Inslaw Inc., and Dean Merrill, a former Inslaw vice president, were still very much concerned about the past.

The two men studied six photographs laid out before them. “Have you ever seen any of these men?” Merrill was asked. Immediately he singled out the second photo. In a separate line up, Hamilton’s secretary singled out the same photo.

Both said the man had visited Inslaw in February 1983 for a presentation of PROMIS, Inslaw’s bread-and-butter legal software. Hamilton, who knew the purpose of the line-up, identified the visitor as Dr. Ben Orr. At the time of his visit, Orr claimed to be a public prosecutor from Israel.

Orr was impressed with the power of PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information Systems), which had recently been updated by Inslaw to run on powerful 32-bit VAX computers from Digital Equipment Corp. “He fell in love with the VAX version,” Hamilton recalled.

Dr. Orr never came back, and he never bought anything. No one knew why at the time. But for Hamilton, who has fought the Department of Justice (DOJ) for almost 10 years in an effort to salvage his business, once his co- workers recognized the man in the second photo, it all made perfect sense.

For the second photo was not of the mysterious Dr. Orr, it was of Rafael Etian, chief of the Israeli defense force’s anti-terrorism intelligence unit. The Department of Justice sent him over for a look at the property they were about to “misappropriate,” and Etian liked what he saw. Department of Justice documents record that one Dr. Ben Orr left the DOJ on May 6, 1983, with a computer tape containing PROMIS tucked under his arm.

What for the past decade has been known as the Inslaw affair began to unravel in the final, shredder-happy days of the Bush administration. According to Federal court documents, PROMIS was stolen from Inslaw by the Department of Justice directly after Etian’s 1983 visit to Inslaw (a later congressional investigation preferred to use the word “misappropriated”). And according to sworn affidavits, PROMIS was then given or sold at a profit to Israel and as many as 80 other countries by Dr. Earl W. Brian, a man with close personal and business ties to then-President Ronald Reagan and then-Presidential counsel Edwin Meese.

A House Judiciary Committee report released last September found evidence raising “serious concerns” that high officials at the Department of Justice executed a pre-meditated plan to destroy Inslaw and co-opt the rights to its PROMIS software. The committee’s call for an independent counsel have fallen on deaf ears. One journalist, Danny Casolaro, died as he attempted to tell the story (see sidebar), and boxes of documents relating to the case have been destroyed, stolen, or conveniently “lost” by the Department of Justice.

But so far, not a single person has been held accountable.

WIRED has spent two years searching for the answers to the questions Inslaw poses: Why would Justice steal PROMIS? Did it then cover up the theft? Did it let associates of government officials sell PROMIS to foreign governments, which then used the software to track political dissidents instead of legal cases? (Israel has reportedly used PROMIS to track troublesome Palestinians.)

The implications continue: that Meese profited from the sales of the stolen property. That Brian, Meese’s business associate, may have been involved in the October Surprise (the oft-debunked but persistent theory that the Reagan campaign conspired to insure that US hostages in Iran were held until after Reagan won the 1980 election, see sidebar). That some of the moneys derived from the illegal sales of PROMIS furthered covert and illegal government programs in Nicaragua. That Oliver used PROMIS as a population tracking instrument for his White House-based domestic emergency management program.

Each new set of allegations leads to a new set of possibilities, which makes the story still more difficult to comprehend. But one truth is obvious: What the Inslaw case presents, in its broadest possible implications, is a painfully clear snapshot of how the Justice Department operated during the Reagan-Bush years.

This is the case that won’t go away, the case that shows how justice and public service gave way to profit and political expediency, how those within the administration’s circle of privilege were allowed to violate private property and civil rights for their own profit.

Sound like a conspiracy theorist’s dream? Absolutely. But the fact is, it’s true.

The Background

Imagine you are in charge of the legal arm of the most powerful government on the face of the globe, but your internal information systems are mired in the archaic technology of the 1960s. There’s a Department of Justice database, a CIA database, an Attorney’s General database, an IRS database, and so on, but none of them can share information. That makes tracking multiple offenders pretty darn difficult, and building cases against them a long and bureaucratic task.

Along comes a computer program that can integrate all these databases, and it turns out its development was originally funded by the government under a Law Enforcement Assistance Administration grant in the 1970s. That means the software is public domain … free!

Edwin Meese was apparently quite taken with PROMIS. He told an April 1981 gathering of prosecutors that PROMIS was “one of the greatest opportunities for [law enforcement] success in the future.” In March 1982, Inslaw won a $9.6 million contract from the Justice Department to install the public domain version of PROMIS in 20 US Attorney’s offices as a pilot program. If successful, the company would install PROMIS in the remaining 74 federal prosecutors’ offices around the country. The eventual market for complete automation of the Federal court system was staggering: as much as $3 billion, according to Bill Hamilton. But Hamilton would never see another federal contract.

Designed as a case-management system for prosecutors, PROMIS has the ability to track people. “Every use of PROMIS in the court system is tracking people,” said Inslaw President Hamilton. “You can rotate the file by case, defendant, arresting officer, judge, defense lawyer, and it’s tracking all the names of all the people in all the cases.”

What this means is that PROMIS can provide a complete rundown of all federal cases in which a lawyer has been involved, or all the cases in which a lawyer has represented defendant A, or all the cases in which a lawyer has represented white-collar criminals, at which stage in each of the cases the lawyer agreed to a plea bargain, and so on. Based on this information, PROMIS can help a prosecutor determine when a plea will be taken in a particular type of case.

But the real power of PROMIS, according to Hamilton, is that with a staggering 570,000 lines of computer code, PROMIS can integrate innumerable databases without requiring any reprogramming. In essence, PROMIS can turn blind data into information. And anyone in government will tell you that information, when wielded with finesse, begets power. Converted to use by intelligence agencies, as has been alleged in interviews by ex-CIA and Israeli Mossad agents, PROMIS can be a powerful tracking device capable of monitoring intelligence operations, agents and targets, instead of legal cases.

At the time of its inception, PROMIS was the most powerful program of its type. But a similar program, DALITE, was developed under another LEAA grant by D. Lowell Jensen, the Alameda County (Calif.) District Attorney. In the mid-1970s, the two programs vied for a lucrative Los Angeles County contract and Inslaw won out. (Early in his career, Ed Meese worked under Jensen at the Alameda County District Attorney’s office. Jensen was later appointed to Meese’s Justice Department during the Reagan presidency.)

In the final days of the Carter administration, the LEAA was phased out. Inslaw had made a name for itself and Hamilton wanted to stay in business, so he converted Inslaw to a for-profit, private business. The new Inslaw did not own the public domain version of PROMIS because it had been developed with LEAA funds. But because it had funded a major upgrade with its own money, Inslaw did claim ownership of the enhanced PROMIS.

Through his lawyers, Hamilton sent the Department of Justice a letter outlining his company’s decision to go private with the enhanced PROMIS. The letter specifically asked the DOJ to waive any proprietary rights it might claim to the enhanced version. In a reply dated August 11, 1982, a DOJ lawyer wrote: “To the extent that any other enhancements (beyond the public domain PROMIS) were privately funded by Inslaw and not specified to be delivered to the Department of Justice under any contract or other agreement, Inslaw may assert whatever proprietary rights it may have.”

Arnold Burns, then a deputy attorney general, clarified the DOJ’s position in a now-critical 1988 deposition: “Our lawyers were satisfied that Inslaw’s lawyers could sustain the claim in court, that we had waived those [proprietary] rights.”

The enhancements Inslaw claimed were significant. In the 1970s the public- domain PROMIS was adapted to run on Burroughs, Prime, Wang and IBM machines, all of which used less-powerful 16-bit architectures. With private funds, Inslaw converted that version of PROMIS to a 32-bit architecture running on a DEC VAX minicomputer. It was this version that Etian saw in 1983. It was this version that the DOJ stole later that year through a pre-meditated plan, according to two court decisions.

The Dispute Grows

On a gorgeous spring morning in 1981, Lawrence McWhorter, director of the Executive Office for US Attorneys, put his feet on his desk, lit an Italian cigar, eyed his subordinate Frank Mallgrave and said through a haze of blue smoke: “We’re out to get Inslaw.”

McWhorter had just asked Mallgrave to oversee the pilot installation of PROMIS, a job Mallgrave refused, unaware at the time that he was being asked to participate in Inslaw’s deliberate destruction.

“We were just in his office for what I call a B.S. type discussion,” Mallgrave told WIRED. “I remember it was a bright sunny morning…. (McWhorter) asked me if I would be interested in assuming the position of Assistant Director for Data Processing…basically working with Inslaw. I told him…I just had no interest in that job. And then, almost as an afterthought, he said ‘We’re out to get Inslaw.’ I remember it to this day.”

After Mallgrave refused the job, McWhorter gave it to C. Madison “Brick” Brewer. Brewer at one time worked for Inslaw, but was allowed to resign when Hamilton found his performance inadequate, according to court documents. Brewer was then hired into the Department of Justice specifically to oversee the contract of his former employer. (The DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility ruled there was no conflict of interest.) He would later tell a federal court that everything he did regarding Inslaw was approved by Deputy Attorney General Lowell Jensen, the same man who once supervised DALITE, the product which lost a major contract to Inslaw in the 1970s.

Brewer, who now refuses to comment on the Inslaw case, was aided in his new DOJ job by Peter Videnieks. Videnieks was fresh from the Customs Service, where he oversaw contracts between that agency and Hadron, Inc., a company controlled by Meese and Reagan-crony Earl Brian. Hadron, a closely held government systems consulting firm, was to figure prominently in the forthcoming scandal.

According to congressional and court documents, Brewer and Videnieks didn’t tarry in their efforts to destroy Inslaw. After Inslaw’s installation of public domain PROMIS had begun, the DOJ claimed that Inslaw, which was supporting the installation with its own computers running the enhanced version of PROMIS, was on the brink of bankruptcy. Although Inslaw was contracted to provide only the public domain PROMIS, the DOJ demanded that Inslaw turn over the enhanced version of PROMIS in case the company could not complete its contractual obligations. Inslaw agreed to this contract modification, but on two conditions: that the DOJ recognize Inslaw’s proprietary rights to enhanced PROMIS, and that the DOJ not distribute enhanced PROMIS beyond the boundaries of the contract (the 94 US Attorney’s offices.)

The DOJ agreed to these conditions, but requested Inslaw prove it had indeed created enhanced PROMIS with private funds. Inslaw said it would, and the enhanced software was given to the DOJ.

Once the DOJ had control of PROMIS, it dogmatically refused to verify that Inslaw had created the enhancements, essentially rendering the contract modification useless. When Inslaw protested, the DOJ began to withhold payments. Two years later, Inslaw was forced into bankruptcy.

As the contract problems with DOJ emerged, Hamilton received a phone call from Dominic Laiti, chief executive of Hadron. Laiti wanted to buy Inslaw. Hamilton refused to sell. According to Hamilton’s statements in court documents, Laiti then warned him that Hadron had friends in the government and if Inslaw didn’t sell willingly, it would be forced to sell.

Those government connections included Peter Videnieks over at the Justice Department, according to John Schoolmeester, Videnieks’ former Customs Service supervisor. Laiti and Videnieks both deny ever meeting or having any contact, but Schoolmeester has told both WIRED and the House Judiciary Committee it was “impossible” for the pair not to know each other because of the type of work and oversight involved in Hadron’s relationship with the Customs Service. Schoolmeester also said that because of Brian’s relationship with then-President Reagan (see sidebar), Hadron was considered an “inside” company.

The full-court press continued. In 1985 Allen & Co., a New York investment banking concern with close business ties to Earl Brian, helped finance a second company, SCT, which also attempted to purchase Inslaw. That attempt also failed, but in the process a number of Inslaw’s customers were warned by SCT that Inslaw would soon go bankrupt and would not survive reorganization, Hamilton said in court documents.

Broke and with no friends in the government, on June 9, 1986, Inslaw filed a $30 million lawsuit against the DOJ in bankruptcy court. Inslaw’s attorney for the case (he was later fired from his firm under extremely suspicious circumstances — see sidebar) was Leigh Ratiner of the Wash- ington firm Dickstein, Shapiro & Morin. Ratiner chose bankruptcy court for the filing based on the premise that Justice, the creditor, had control of PROMIS. He explained recently, “It was forbidden by the BankruptcyAct for the creditor to exercise control over the debtor property. And that theory — that the Justice Department was exercising control — was the basis that the bankruptcy court had jurisdiction.

“As far as I know, this was the first time this theory had been used,” Ratiner told WIRED. “This was ground-breaking. It was, in fact, a legitimate use of the code.”

It worked, but to only a point. In 1987, Washington, D.C., bankruptcy judge George Bason ruled in a scathing opinion that Justice had stolen PROMIS through “trickery, fraud and deceit.” He awarded Inslaw $6.8 million in damages and, in the process, found that Justice Department officials made a concerted effort to bankrupt Inslaw and place the company’s enhanced PROMIS up for public auction (where it would then be fodder for Brian’s Hadron). Bason’s findings of fact relied on testimony from Justice employees and internal memoranda, some of which outlined a plan to “get” PROMIS software.

Bason cited the testimony of a number of the government’s defense witnesses as being “unbelievable” and openly questioned the credibility of others. In his 216-page ruling, Bason cites numerous instances where testimony from government witnesses is contradictory. (In a private interview with WIRED he noted that as a bankruptcy judge he was precluded from bringing perjury charges against government employees, but he had recommended to various congressional panels that an inquiry was necessary.)

When the DOJ appealed, a federal district court affirmed Bason, ruling that there was “convincing, perhaps compelling support for the findings set forth by the bankruptcy court.” But the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the case on a legal technicality, finding that the bankruptcy court had no jurisdiction to hear the damages claim. A petition to the Supreme Court in October 1991 was denied review.

The IRS got into the act as well. Inslaw was audited several times in the course of their battles with the Department of Justice. In fact, the day following the bankruptcy trial, S. Martin Teel, a lawyer for the IRS, requested that Judge Bason liquidate Inslaw. Bason ruled against Teel. As a coda to the lawsuit, Bason, a respected jurist, was not re-appointed to the bench when his term expired. His replacement? S. Martin Teel. (Bason has testified before Congress that the DOJ orchestrated his replacement as punishment for his rulings in the Inslaw case.)

But Inslaw’s troubles did not end with bankruptcy. Frustrated by Attorney General Dick Thornburgh’s stubborn refusal to investigate the DOJ or appoint an independent prosecutor, Elliot Richardson, President Nixon’s former attorney general and a counsel to Inslaw for nearly 10 years (he retired this January), filed a case in U.S. District Court demanding that Thornburgh investigate the Inslaw affair. In 1990, the court ruled that a prosecutor’s decision not to investigate — “no matter how indefensible” — cannot be corrected by any court. Another loss for Inslaw.

Broke and still attempting to revive itself, Inslaw has not refiled its suit, preferring to wait for a new administration and a new DOJ.

By this time, the spinning jennies of the conspiracy network had grasped the Inslaw story and were all-too-eager to put their stitch in the unraveling yarn. According to documents and affidavits filed during court cases and congressional inquiries, the Hamiltons and their lawyers began receiving phone calls, visits and memos from a string of shadowy sources, many of them connected to international drug, spy and arms networks. Their allegations: That Earl Brian helped orchestrate the October Surprise for then-candidate Reagan, and that Brian’s eventual payment for that orchestration was a cut of the PROMIS action. Brian and the DOJ then resold or gave PROMIS to as many as 80 foreign and domestic agencies. (Brian adamantly denies any connection to Inslaw or the October Surprise.)

These sources, which include ex-Israeli spy Ari Ben Menashe and a computer programmer of dubious reputation, Michael Riconosciuto, allege that PROMIS had been further modified by the DOJ so that any agency using it could be subject to undetected DOJ eavesdropping — a sort of software Trojan Horse. If these allegations are true, by the late 1980s PROMIS could have become the digital ears of the US Government’s spy effort — both internal and external. Certainly something the administration wouldn’t want nosy congressional committees looking into.

The diaphanous web of more than 30 sources who offered information to Inslaw were not “what a lawyer might consider ideal witnesses,” Richardson admitted. But their stories yielded a surprising consistency. “The picture that emerges from the individual statements is remarkably detailed and consistent,” he wrote in an Oct. 21, 1991 New York Times Op Ed.

The Congressional Investigation

The string of lawsuits and widening allegations caught the eye of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks, D-Texas, who in 1989 launched a three-year investigation into the Inslaw affair. In the resulting report, the Committee suggested that among others, Edwin Meese, while presidential counselor and later as attorney general, and D. Lowell Jensen, a former assistant and deputy attorney general and now a US district judge in San Francisco, conspired to steal PROMIS.

“High government officials were involved,” the report states. “… (S)everal individuals testified under oath that Inslaw’s PROMIS software was stolen and distributed internationally in order to provide financial gain and to further intelligence and foreign policy objectives.”

“Actions against Inslaw were implemented through the Project Manager (Brick Brewer) from the beginning of the contract and under the direction of high- level Justice Department officials,” the report says. “The evidence…demonstrates that high-level Department officials deliberately ignored Inslaw proprietary rights and misappropriated its PROMIS software for use at locations not covered under contract with the company.”

The Committee report accuses former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh of stonewalling congressional inquiries, turning a blind eye to the possible destruction of evidence within the Justice Department, and ignoring the DOJ’s harassment of employees questioned by Congressional investigators.

Rep. Brooks told WIRED that the report should be the starting point for a grand jury investigation. The owners of Inslaw, Brooks said, were “ravaged by the Justice Department…treated like dogs.”

Brooks’ committee voted along party lines, 21-13, to adopt the investigative report on Aug. 11, 1992. The report asked then-Attorney General William Barr to “immediately settle Inslaw’s claims in a fair and equitable manner” and “strongly recommends that the Department seek the appointment of an Independent Counsel.”

As he did with the burgeoning Iraqgate scandal and as his predecessor did before him, Barr refused to appoint an independent counsel to the Inslaw case, relying instead on a retired federal judge, in this case Nicholas Bua, who reported to Barr alone. In other words, the DOJ was responsible for investigating itself.

“The way in which the Department of Justice has treated this case, to me, is inexplicable,” Richardson told WIRED. “I think the circumstances most strongly suggest that there must be wider ramifications.”

The Threads Unravel

Proof of those wider ramifications are just starting to leak out, as DOJ and other agency employees begin to talk, although for the most part they spoke to WIRED only on condition of anonymity.

On Nov. 20, 1990, the Judiciary Committee wrote a letter asking CIA director William Webster to help the committee “by determining whether the CIA has the PROMIS software.”

The official reply on December 11th: “We have checked with Agency components that track data processing procurement or that would be likely users of PROMIS, and we have been unable to find any indication that the Agency ever obtained PROMIS software.”

But a retired CIA official whose job it was to investigate the Inslaw allegations internally told WIRED that the DOJ gave PROMIS to the CIA. “Well,” the retired official told WIRED, “the congressional committees were after us to look into allegations that somehow the agency had been culpable of what would have been, in essence, taking advantage of, like stealing, the technology [PROMIS]. We looked into it and there was enough to it, the agency had been involved.”

How was the CIA involved? According to the same source, who requested anonymity, the agency accepted stolen goods, not aware that a major scandal was brewing. In other words, the DOJ robbed the bank, and the CIA took a share of the plunder.

But the CIA was not the only place where illegal versions of PROMIS cropped up. Canadian documents (held by the House Judiciary Committee and obtained by WIRED) place PROMIS in the hands of various Canadian government agencies. These documents include two letters to Inslaw from Canadian agencies requesting detailed user manuals — even though Inslaw has never sold PROMIS to Canada. Canadian officials now claim the letters were in error.

And, of course, the software was transferred to Rafael Etian’s anti- terrorism unit in Israel. The DOJ claims it was the LEAA version, but former Israeli spy Ben Menashe and others claim it was the 32-bit version. According to Ben Menashe, other government departments within Israel also saw PROMIS, and this time the pitchman was Dr. Earl Brian. In a 1991 affidavit related to the bankruptcy proceedings, Ben Menashe claimed: “I attended a meeting at my Department’s headquarters in Tel Aviv in 1987 during which Dr. Earl W. Brian of the United States made a presentation intended to facilitate the use of the PROMIS computer software.”

“Dr. Brian stated during his presentation that all U.S. Intelligence Agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency and the U.S. Department of Justice were then using the PROMIS computer software,” Ben Menashe continued. While the credibility of his statements has been questioned, the Israeli government has admitted that Ben Menashe had access to extremely sensitive information during his tenure at the Mossad.

Asked why Israeli intelligence would have been so interested in Inslaw and PROMIS, Ben Menashe said, “PROMIS was a very big thing for us guys, a very, very big thing … it was probably the most important issue of the ’80s because it just changed the whole intelligence outlook. The whole form of intelligence collection changed. This whole thing changed it.” PROMIS, Ben Menashe said, was perfect for tracking Palestinians and other political dissidents.

(Ben Menashe’s superior during this period was Rafael Etian, or Dr. Ben Orr, as he was known during his 1983 visit to Inslaw.)

Apparently, Israel was not the only country interested in using PROMIS for internal security purposes. Lt. Col. Oliver North also may have been using the program. According to several intelligence community sources, PROMIS was in use at a 6,100-square-foot command center built on the sixth floor of the Justice Department. According to both a contractor who helped design the center and information disclosed during the Iran-Contra hearings, Oliver North had a similar, but smaller, White House operations room that was connected by computer link to the DOJ’s command center.

Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States as part of a domestic emergency preparedness program, commissioned under Reagan’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), according to sources and published reports. Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn up lists of anyone ever arrested for a political protest, for example, or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon’s enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy’s blacklist look downright crude. This operation was so sensitive that when Rep. Jack Brooks asked North about it during the Iran-Contra hearings, the hearing was immediately suspended pending an executive (secret) conference. When the hearings were reconvened, the issue of North’s FEMA dealings was dropped.

A Thorough Cleaning at the White House?

If the case against the Department of Justice is so solid, why hasn’t anything been done? The answer is timing. The next move belongs to retired Federal Judge Bua, since he was given oversight by Attorney General Barr in lieu of an independent counsel. And everyone, including Judge Bua, whose non-binding report was pending at WIRED’s early December deadline, seems to be waiting for the new administration. Both the Clinton/Gore transition team and House majority leader Richard Gephardt had no comment on the Inslaw case pending Clinton’s inauguration.

But a source close to Bua’s investigation said the retired judge may present the DOJ with a bombshell. While not required to suggest a settlement, the source believes Bua will reportedly recommend that Inslaw be given between $25 million and $50 million for its mistreatment by the DOJ. (In last-minute negotiations, Inslaw attorney Elliot Richardson held brief meetings with DOJ officials in mid-December. Richardson pressed for a settlement ranging from $25 million to $500 million, but the DOJ balked, according to newspaper reports.)

But the question remains: Can the DOJ paper over the willful destruction of a company, the plundering of its software, the illegal resale of that software to further foreign policy objectives, and the overt obstruction of justice with $25 million?

Bua’s final recommendation, expected sometime before Clinton’s inauguration, is that the Inslaw Affair “requires further investigation,” the source said. That conclusion mirrors the House Judiciary Committee’s report. Privately, many Democrats, including Gephardt, have expressed a strong desire to get to the bottom of the Inslaw case. Rep. Brooks will be pushing for yet another investigation of the scandal, this time independent of the Justice Department, according to Congressional sources. Once Bua’s report is out, the next and possibly final move will be up to a new president, a new Congress, and, possibly, a renewed sense of justice.

Earl W. Brian – The Consumate Insider

Dr. Earl W. Brian has made quite a career of riding Reagan and Meese’s coattails. After a stint in Vietnam, where he worked as a combat physician in the unit that supplied air support for Operation Phoenix, Brian returned to California with a chest full of ribbons and a waiting job – as Secretary of Health – with then-Governor Reagan’s administration. (Operation Phoenix, a well-documented CIA political assassination program, used computers to track “enemies” in Vietnam.)

In 1974, Brian resigned his cabinet post with Governor Reagan to run for the Senate against Alan Cranston. After his defeat, Brian moved into the world of business and soon ran into trouble. His flagship company, Xionics, was cited by the Security and Exchange Commission for issuing press releases designed to boost stock prices with exaggerated or bloated information. The SEC also accused Xionics of illegally paying “commissions” to brokers, according to SEC documents.

At the close of the Reagan governorship, Brian was involved in a public scandal having to do with – surprise – stolen computer tapes. The tapes, which contained records of 70,000 state welfare files, were eventually returned – Brian claimed he had a right to them under a contract signed in the last hours of the administration. (Brian said he just wanted to develop a better way of doing welfare business.)

In 1980, Brian formed Biotech Capital Corp., a venture capital firm designed to invest in biological and medical companies. Ultimately, Brian has invested in and owned several companies, including FNN (Financial News Network) and UPI, both of which ended up in dire financial straits.

Ursula Meese, who like her husband knew Brian from the Reagan cabinet, was an early investor in Biotech, using $15,000 (borrowed from Edwin Thomas, a Meese aide in the White House and another Reaganite from California) to purchase 2,000 shares on behalf of the Meese’s two children, according to information made public during Meese’s confirmation hearings for Attorney General.

It is those Reagan-Meese connections that continue to drag Brian into the Inslaw affair. For why would Brian, of all people, be the recipient of stolen PROMIS? PROMIS, after all, was a major part in government automation contracts estimated at $3 billion, according to Inslaw President Bill Hamilton. That’s quite a political plum.

One possibility is Ed and Ursula Meese’s financial connections to Brian. Another is a payoff for Brian’s role in the October Surprise Even if he manages to evade the Inslaw allegations, Brian may still be in hot water. As of this writing, Financial News Network’s financial dealings were under investigation by a Los Angeles Grand Jury, according to sources who have testified before it. – RLF

What A Surprise!

Earl W. Brian says he wasn’t in Paris in October 1980, but investors were told a different story

As Inslaw President Bill Hamilton moved his company from non-profit status to the private sector in 1980, Ronald Reagan was running for President, negotiations for the release of the American hostages in Iran had apparently hit a snag, and Dr. Earl W. Brian was touring Canada touting stock in his newly acquired Clinical Sciences Inc.

History records that the hostages were released as Ronald Reagan took the Presidential oath of office, and that shortly thereafter, Inslaw received a $9.6 million contract from the Department of Justice. At the same time, Earl Brian was appointed to a White House post to advise on health-care issues. Brian reported directly to Ed Meese. He also arranged White House tours to woo investors in his government contracting company, Hadron Inc., according to a Canadian investment banker who took a tour.

But these seemingly random historical connections between Inslaw, Hadron, the Reagan White House and Earl Brian take on a new meaning when considered in light of the “October Surprise,” the persistent allegation that the Reagan campaign negotiated with Iranian officials to guarantee that US hostages would not be released before Reagan won election in 1980.

The October Surprise theory hinges in part on alleged negotiations between the Reagan campaign and the Iranians on the weekend of Oct. 17-21, 1980, in Paris, among other places.The deal, according to former Iranian President Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, ex-Israeli spy Ari Ben Menashe, and a former CIA contract agent interviewed by WIRED, included the payment of $40 million to the Iranians.

According to several sources, Earl Brian, one of Reagan’s close advisors, made it quite clear that he was planning to be in Paris that very weekend. Ben Menashe, who says he was one of six Israelis, 12 Americans and 16 Iranians present at the Paris talks, said, “I saw Brian in Paris.”

Brian was interviewed by Senate investigators on July 28, 1992, and denied under oath any connection with the alleged negotiations. He told the investigators he did not have a valid passport during the October 1980 dates. But according to court documents and interviews, Brian told Canadian investors in his newly acquired Clinical Sciences, Inc., that he would be in Paris that weekend. Brian acquired controlling interest in Clinical Sciences in the summer of 1980. Clinical Sciences was then trading at around $2 a share. Brian worked with Janos P. Pasztor, a vice president and special situations analyst with the Canadian investment bank of Nesbitt, Thomson, Bongard Inc., to create a market of Canadian investors for the stock.

Pasztor later testified in court documents that Brian said he would be in Paris the weekend of October 17 to do a deal with the Pasteur Institute (a medical research firm).

Two other brokers, Harry Scully, a broker based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and John Belton, a senior account executive with Nesbitt-Thomson from 1968 to 1982 who is suing Nesbitt-Thomson and Pasztor for securities fraud, also claim that they were told that Brian was in Paris that weekend.

But if Brian went to Paris to see the Pasteur Institute, he seems to have missed his appointment. An investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police into Clinical Sci-ences stock transactions revealed that the Pasteur Institute had never conducted business with, or even heard of Brian.

When asked by WIRED to elaborate on Brian’s 1980 trip, Pasztor said, “These are political questions and I don’t want to become involved.” He refused further comment.Brian contends that the dates of his trip were in error and that he went to Paris in April 1981, not October 1980. But the passport he turned over to Senate investigators did not contain a French entry or exit stamp for April 1981.

Through his lawyers, Brian refused to be interviewed for this story. – RLF

Earl W. Brian: Closet Spook?

Michael Riconosciuto, a computer programmer and chemist who surfs the spooky fringe of the guns-’n'-money crowd, is currently serving a federal prison sentence for drug crimes. From his jail cell he has given several interviews claiming knowledge of Inslaw and the October Surprise (he also claims his jail term is the DOJ’s way of punishing him for his knowledge). Much of what he claims cannot be verified, other statements have failed to be veri-fied conclusively.

But prior to his arrest in 1991, Riconosciuto provided the Hamiltons with an affidavit that once again brought Brian into the Inslaw picture. “I engaged in some software development and modification work in 1983 and 1984 on proprietary PROMIS computer software product,” he stated. “The copy of PROMIS on which I worked came from the US Department of Justice. Earl W. Brian made it available to me through Wackenhut (a security company with close FBI and CIA connections) after acquiring it from Peter Videnieks, who was then a Department of Justice contracting official with the responsibility for PROMIS software. I performed the modifications to PROMIS in Indio, Calif.; Silver Springs, Md.; and Miami, Fla.”

The modifications included a telecommunications “trap door” that would let the US Government eavesdrop on any other organization using the pirated software, Riconosciuto said.

Videnieks and Brian both told House investigators that they did not know Riconosciuto. After Riconosciuto was interviewed by House investigators, Videnieks refused to give Congress further interviews.

Although Brian denies any involvement with Inslaw or Riconosciuto, the House Judiciary Committee received a report from a special task force of the Riverside County, Calif., Sheriff’s Office and District Attorney, stating that on the evening of Sept. 10, 1981, arms dealers, buyers and various intelligence operatives gathered at the Cabazon Indian Reservation near Indio, Calif., for a demonstration of night warfare weapons. The demonstration was orchestrated jointly by Wackenhut and the Cabazon Indian tribe. (Many published reports allege that the Wackenhut/Cabazon joint venture served as a weapons fencing operation for Oliver North’s Iran- Contra dealings.)

According to Indio city police officers hired to provide security, those attending included Earl W. Brian, who was identified as “being with the CIA,” and Michael Riconosciuto. – RLF

US Deputy Attorney General Jensen Lost Once To Inslaw

Could It Be He Wanted to Even The Score? At the time of its inception, PROMIS was the most powerful program of its type. But a similar program, DALITE, was developed under another LEAA grant by D. Lowell Jensen, the Alameda County, Calif., District Attorney. In the mid-1970s, the two programs vied for a lucrative Los Angeles County contract and Inslaw won out.

Early in his career, Attorney General-to-be Edwin Meese worked under Jensen at the Alameda County District Attorney’s office. Jensen was later appointed as Deputy Attorney General into Meese’s Justice Department.

C. Madison “Brick” Brewer, accused by the House Judiciary Committee of deliberately misappropriating PROMIS, testified in federal court that everything he did regarding Inslaw was approved by D. Lowell Jensen, the same man who once supervised DALITE.

Was Israel’s PROMIS to Crush the Infitada?

Asked why Israeli intelligence would have been so interested in Inslaw and PROMIS, ex-Israeli spy Ari Ben Menashe said: “PROMIS was a very big thing for us guys, a very, very big thing … it was probably the most important issue of the ’80s because it just changed the whole intelligence outlook. The whole form of intelligence collection changed. This whole thing changed it.” Why? PROMIS, Ben Menashe said, was perfect for tracking the Palestinian population and other political dissidents.

Did Oliver North Use PROMIS?

Apparently, Israel was not the only country interested in using PROMIS for internal security purposes. Lt. Col. Oliver North also may have been using the program. According to several intelligence community sources, PROMIS was in use at a 6,100-square-foot command center built on the sixth floor of the Justice Department. According to both a contractor who helped design the center and information disclosed during the Iran-Contra hearings, Oliver North had a similar, but smaller, White House operations room that was connected by computer link to the DOJ’s command center.

Who Fired Inslaw’s Lawyer?

As the Inslaw-DOJ battle was joined in bankruptcy court, Inslaw’s chief attorney, Leigh Ratiner, was fired from Dickstein, Shapiro & Morin, the firm where he had been a partner for 10 years. His firing came after another Dickstein partner, Leonard Garment, met with Arnold Burns, then- deputy attorney general of the DOJ.

Garment was counsel to President Richard Nixon and assistant to President Gerald Ford. He testified before a Senate inquiry that he and Meese discussed the Inslaw case in October 1986, and afterward he met with Burns. Two days later Ratiner was fired.

The terms of the financial settlement between Ratiner and his firm were kept confidential, but WIRED has been told by ex-Israeli spy Ari Ben Menashe that Israeli intelligence paid to have Ratiner fired, and that the money was transferred through Hadron Inc., the same company that Earl Brian used to distribute illegal copies of PROMIS. Through informed sources, WIRED has independently confirmed portions of Ben Menashe’s allegations.

Ben Menashe has told WIRED that he saw a memo in Israel, written in Hebrew, requesting funds for “a lawyer.” He claims to have seen the memo at the office of a joint Mossad (Israeli CIA), Internal Defense Forces and Military committee specializing in Israeli-Iran relations. Israel admits that Ben Menashe handled communications at this level and therefore would have had access to such transmissions.

Ben Menashe said the money was used as Ratiner’s settlement payment. “The money was transferred, $600,000, to Hadron,” he said. As to why Hadron was used, Ben Menashe claims: “Because [Brian] was involved quite deeply.” He said Ratiner was unaware of the source of the settlement funds.

Ratiner, contacted after the Ben Menashe interview, said he had never disclosed the amount of the separation settlement to anyone. He is limited contractually by his former firm from discussing any specifics of the firing. Asked if Ben Menashe’s figures were correct, Ratiner said, “I can’t comment because it would be the same as revealing them.” WIRED located a deep background source who confirmed that the amount was “correct almost to the penny.”

Ratiner said he was shocked at the allegations of money laundering. “Dickstein, Shapiro is the 10th largest firm in Washington and I had no reason to think it was other than reputable,” he said. “Why is it that everyone who comes in contact with the Inslaw case becomes a victim?” – RLF

A Dead Journalist Raises Some Eyebrows

Among the many strong conclusions of the “House Judiciary Committee Report on the Inslaw Affair” was this rather startling and brief recommendation: “Investigate Mr. Casolaro’s death.”

Freelance reporter Danny Casolaro spent the last few years of his life investigating a pattern which he called “The Octopus.” According to Casolaro, Inslaw was only part of a greater story of how intelligence agencies, the Department of Justice and even the mob had subverted the government and its various functions for their own profit.

Casolaro had hoped to write a book based on his reporting. His theories, which some seasoned investigative journalists have described as naive, led him into a Bermuda Triangle of spooks, guns, drugs and organized crime. On August 10th, 1991, he was found dead in a Martinsburg, W. Va., hotel room. Both wrists were deeply slashed.

Casolaro’s death has only deepened the mystery surrounding Inslaw. Among the more unusual aspects of his death: He had gone to Martinsburg to meet an informant whose name he never revealed. He had called home the afternoon before his death to say he would be late for a family gathering. Martinsburg police allowed his body to be embalmed before family members were notified and warned hotel employees not to speak to reporters. The hotel room was immediately scrubbed by a cleaning service. Casolaro had told several friends and his brother that if anything ever happened to him, not to believe it was an accident. And his notes, which witnesses saw him carry into the hotel, were missing.

His death was ruled a suicide by Martinsburg and West Virginia authorities several months later. Friends, relatives and some investigators still cry foul.

A source close to retired Federal Judge Nicholas Bua (the Bush Administration appointee who is investigating Inslaw) said Bua will not come to any conclusions regarding Casolaro’s fate. “I don’t know if he committed suicide or if it was murder,” the source said. “But the evidence is consistent with both theories. There are things that bother me but … certainly no one can be indicted on the evidence that is available.”

What does that mean? Either an independent investigation drums up more evidence, or the case may never be solved.

The House Judiciary Committee may have written what could be called the final word on Danny Casolaro’s inexplicable death: “As long as the possibility exists that Danny Casolaro died as a result of his investigation into the Inslaw matter, it is imperative that further investigation be conducted.” – RLF

InslawGate?

Elliot Richardson, President Nixon’s former attorney general (he was fired when he refused to fire Archibald Cox during the Watergate scandal) has been a counsel to Inslaw for nearly 10 years (he retired this January). In a Oct. 21, 1991 New York Times Op Ed, Richardson wrote: “This is not the first time I have had to think about the need for an independent investigator. I had been a member of the Nixon Administration from the beginning when I was nominated as Attorney General in 1973. Confidence in the integrity of the Watergate investigation could best be insured, I thought, by entrusting it to someone who had no prior connection to the White House. With Inslaw, the charges against the Justice Department make the same course even more imperative.

“When the Watergate special prosecutor began his inquiry, indications of the President’s complicity were not as strong as those that now point to a broad conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of Inslaw’s technology.”

A Well-Covered Coverup?

The House Committee Report contained some no-holds-barred language on the issue of stonewalling:

“One of the principle reasons the committee could not reach any definitive conclusion about Inslaw’s allegations of a high criminal conspiracy at Justice was the lack of cooperation from the Department,” the report states. “Throughout the two Inslaw investigations, the Congress met with restrictions, delays and outright denials to requests for information and to unobstructed access to records and witnesses.

“During this committee’s investigation, Attorney General Thornburgh repeatedly reneged on agreements made with this committee to provide full and open access to information and witnesses … the Department failed to provide all the documents subpoenaed, claiming that some of the documents … had been misplaced or accidentally destroyed.”

Rep. Jack Brooks and the House Committee On the Inslaw Case

The string of lawsuits and widening allegations caught the eye of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks, D-Texas, who in 1989 launched a three-year investigation into the Inslaw affair. In the resulting report, the Committee suggested that among others, Edwin Meese, while presidential counselor and later as attorney general, and D. Lowell Jensen, a former assistant and deputy attorney general and now a U.S. district judge in San Francisco, conspired to steal PROMIS.

“There appears to be strong evidence,” the report states, “as indicated by the findings in two Federal Court proceedings as well as by the committee investigation, that the Department of Justice ‘acted willfully and fraudulently,’ and ‘took, converted and stole,’ Inslaw’s Enhanced PROMIS by ‘trickery fraud and deceit.’ ”

“While refusing to engage in good faith negotiations with Inslaw,” the report continues, “Mr. Brewer and Mr. Videnieks, with the approval of high- level Justice Department officials, proceeded to take actions to misappropriate the Enhanced PROMIS software.”

Furthermore, the report states, “several individuals have stated under oath that the Enhanced PROMIS software was stolen and distributed internationally in order to provide financial gain to Dr. Brian and to further intelligence and foreign policy objectives for the United States.”

Rep. Brooks told WIRED that the report should be the starting point for a grand jury investigation. The owners of Inslaw, Brooks said, were “ravaged by the Justice Department … treated like dogs.”

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately